 Greetings from the National Archives Flagship Building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestor lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual author lecture with Zachary M. Schrag, author of The Fires of Philadelphia, which describes the events surrounding the anti-immigration riots in Philadelphia in 1844. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Thursday, July 8th at noon, Amy Sohn will discuss The Man Who Hated Women, her new book about anti-vice activists and U.S. postal inspector Anthony Comstock. And on Thursday, July 15th at noon, we'll hear from Paul Lettersky, who in 1965 was assigned to assist the legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Lettersky's new book, The Director, describes his years in Hoover's inner circle. When we live through periods of unrest, people may be tempted to look nostalgically to the better days in the past. A thoughtful, closer look at those long gone days, however, may reveal that the conflicts of the present have deep roots in the past. Several times in the two and a half centuries of our history, the established have set themselves against those considered outsiders. The question, who is an American, is asked again and again. In Philadelphia in 1844, the objects of attack were Irish Catholic immigrants. Insighted by nativists seeking social and political power, rioters pursued people and destroyed buildings. The book we'll hear about today, The Fires of Philadelphia, relates an episode unfamiliar to many in an era that is often overlooked in U.S. history survey classes. Zachary Shrague studies cities, technology, and public policy in the United States in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. He's the author of three other books, The Great Society's Subway, Ethical Imperialism, and The Princeton Guide to Historical Research. The scholarly articles and essays have been published in several journals, magazines, and newspapers. He has received grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Gerald R. Ford Foundation, and the Library of Congress, and has been awarded the Society of the American City and Regional Planning Histories, John Rep's Prize, and the Journal of Policy and History's Ellis Holly Prize. Our moderator for today's program is Dan Horner, an urban historian of 19th century British North America. He is the author of Taking to the Streets, which received the Canadian Historical Association's Clio Award for the best work on Quebec history in 2020. He's an associate professor and the chair of the Department of Criminology at Ryerson University in Toronto, where he teaches courses on public order, urban space, and historical criminology. Now let's hear from Zachary Shrague and Dan Horner. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, thank you for that introduction, and thank you to the National Archives for organizing today's event and for inviting us to speak about this really fascinating book and this really fascinating moment in the history of Philadelphia and I think in the history of the United States. I am going to take a couple of minutes to sort of give an introduction to the book, and then we'll have some questions for Zachary Shrague, pulling out some really interesting themes from this book, and then we'll have a few minutes at the end for questions from viewers. So let me begin by talking for a couple of minutes about this book. With the fires of Philadelphia, Zachary Shrague pulls us onto the streets of that city in 1844. Readers are given a front row seat to a long simmering conflict between the city's growing Irish Catholic community concentrated in the working class suburbs of Kensington and Southwark, and nativists, American born Protestants with a deeply rooted hostility towards Catholics and their claims on American citizenship. This becomes the central conflict around that pulls the city into violence during these tumultuous months in 1844. This is a work of exhaustive social, political and cultural history, but I think it really gets a balance, right, in terms of being rooted and very careful archival work, but also being a really entertaining text as well. A real page turner, I found it to be. I think I read it in a handful of cities, kind of gobbling down 80 or 100 pages at once. It really pulls readers in. Shrague introduces us to a number of the figures who would come to play a role in the violence and the debate surrounding it, like career grifter and nativist journalist Louis Levin, elite militia Captain George Cadwellauder, ambitious cleric Bishop Kenrick and Sheriff Morton McMichael to name only a few of the colorful characters who make their way through the pages of this book. In describing the violence that engulfed the city and saw entire neighborhoods seemingly go up in flames, we get a unique perspective on just how combustible Philadelphia was during this period as it was gripped by fraught debates over the ability of Irish Catholic immigrants to assimilate into the body politic. And like I said earlier, this is really the fundamental debate at the heart of this conflict. At the core of the nativist thinking that Shrague describes was the assertion that Catholics, with their loyalty to the clergy and ultimately in the mind of nativists to Rome, posed a fundamental threat to the values of the American Republic and the city of Philadelphia's social fabric. So Shrague kind of walks us through this violence that engulfed first the neighborhood of Kensington and then Southwick and then eventually parts of inner city Philadelphia as well. And I won't go through all of this, but he walks us through this trajectory of violence and efforts to restore order onto the streets of the city. I could talk about this for hours, but I want to get to our questions. I think that the book leaves us with these a few sort of piercing questions, one of which is the role of violence in shaping American democracy. We think of this period as sort of a formative one in the evolution of America's democratic institutions, and I think it's really important to remember that a lot of these conflicts were playing themselves out not only on the editorial pages of the local press, but also on the streets of cities like Philadelphia. We see some really interesting insights into changing practices of authority in the city, the debates over the need for professional police departments and other such institutions to restore order in these rapidly growing cities along the Atlantic seaboard of the United States. And finally, it leaves us with some questions about what comes after the violence? How does the city rebuild itself after these events occur? How do individuals who were profoundly impacted by these events begin to rebuild their lives? And how does this fit into those larger narratives of American history during this period, the history of Philadelphia, and sort of the biographies of the people who lived through these events? So those are some of the really, I think, profound questions that the fires of Philadelphia will leave readers with. They certainly left me with some of those questions. But as I said, I didn't want to take up too much time in sort of talking about the book before bringing in Professor Schrag to talk a little bit more about this, and I have some questions here that I thought I would start us off with. So welcome. Thank you. Thank you, Zachary Schrag, for joining us today. So I wanted to start off with a question here. You paint a picture from the outset of the book of Philadelphia as a city that struggled with social unrest. The riots of 1844 were not entirely novel to the city. There had been repeated outbreaks of violence in the previous decade. Why was this the case? Why was Philadelphia so mired in this kind of, in the sort of bloody violence? To what degree is this city's history in the first half of the 19th century distinct from those of other growing American cities during this period? Well, thanks so much, Dan, and thanks for those kind words about the book. I think it could be helpful to think about the early 19th century as the period of rapid change and even chaos that it was. Of course, you have the revolutions in the United States and France and Haiti and also efforts at greater democratization in the British Empire. You also have the industrial revolutions. So new technologies of steamboats and railroads and mechanized looms coming on, as well as changes in agriculture that help fuel a rapid population expansion in many parts of the world, not least of which Ireland. So all of these combine to really unsettle people and people are moving in vast numbers, tens of thousands of people moving across oceans. You have rapid city growth, again, in places in Europe, as well as in the United States, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, Baltimore. All of them are rapidly growing. So to that degree, Philadelphia, I don't think is unique, but rather one part of a much larger urban network of rapidly growing cities, all of which are kind of up for grabs. And so when tens of thousands of Irish immigrants appear in a relatively short period of time, the city has to decide where they fit. Are they only going to be poorly paid workers who are expected to do what they're told, or are they going to have their own piece of the pie, both in terms of economics and space, but also in terms of political power. And so in that sense, it's very hard challenge that the city is facing. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's really interesting. I've gotten a sense of reading about other cities during the same period that there was originally, a certain level of immigration was acceptable because it was assumed that people would move off to the agricultural frontier, that they would continue the push westwards across the North American continent. And what's interesting, I find really interesting about the 1840s is you hit this moment where all of a sudden, because of industrialization and because of the growing scale of immigration, you get a larger segment of that immigrant population who are looking to stay in these cities. And that sort of seems to, I got that sense a little bit here, that that was sort of, all of a sudden, you see this emergence of an urban, you begin to see the emergence of an urban, kind of migrant working class. And that's kind of unsettling to, I guess to some people in the city. Yeah, I think it's Oscar Hamlin's Boston immigrants points this out that Boston had seen waves of immigrants pass through through the port, but they just sort of wave them on, keep on going west please. Yeah. And once the Irish arrive in such numbers that they can't move west, they don't have the resources, many of them are poorer than immigrants from Scandinavia or Germany or other European lands, or they may not want to. They're building communities, they're building churches, they're building schools. That becomes a more contentious issue. And some of the older established families in these cities become quite concerned that they are going to lose power and not recognize the city of their ancestors. And I guess that's what puts democracy at such a really at the heart of this, right? Is because they're worried about, they're all of a sudden seeing that, you know, the principle of, you know, a vote for every man having the opportunity to vote, all of a sudden they realize that the numbers are starting to, are starting to not go in their direction if things continue this way. That's right. And interestingly, the native born Americans don't really try to restrict immigration. I think at some level they would like to, but most of their effort is not to keep people out as much as it is to keep them down. To say that if you are an immigrant from another country, you should have to wait not five years to become a citizen and vote and have full privileges. But 21 years is their demand. They say if an American boy, and of course women are not voting at this point, but if an American boy is born on American soil, he has to wait 21 years to vote. So an Irish, you know, 30-year-old should also have to wait 21 years to vote after arrival. And people are very quick to point out that this would create a kind of, not permanent, but semi-permanent class of, you know, immigrants who don't feel that they have a stake in the country, don't feel that they are participants in the democratic process and may not want to obey laws in which they have no say, may not want to pay taxes on which they do not vote, that whole taxation without representation. But that is the nativist platform. It is 21 years to vote. Let's keep them subordinate to native-born citizens. And in some cases they'll also say that even if you've been here 21 years, if you're not native-born, you shouldn't be able to have a government job, not just, you know, as mayor, but as police officer or as culvert digger. So they're trying to carve out special privileges for the native-born. That's fascinating. There's so many great and really evocative, you know, depictions of the violence in this book. This is what I was telling people earlier about sort of the page-turning quality of this. In describing the violence in its aftermath, you write movingly in a number of places about the losses suffered during the riots as a result of injury. I really like this because I find in some early histories of, you know, rioting and collective violence, we, you know, sort of the human cost of this isn't really considered. So I really like the way that you did this. But you talk about, so you talk about the losses suffered during the riots as a result of injury, the destruction of property and people's residences and death. Do you think that this sense of loss and of grief shaped people's reaction to the violence and to what degree do you think that that happened? So one of the fascinating stories of violence, I think in general, is the way that different kinds of injury and death have different significance to people. And we see that in our own age where an airplane crash will, you know, be on the front pages for days or weeks. And meanwhile, we are losing 30 to 40,000 Americans a year to automobiles. And no one seems to notice that goes on page B3 because those people are just as injured or just as killed, but it's a kind of violence that we take as background noise most Americans do anyway. There are obviously some people who are pushing for better safety. And the same is true of person-to-person violence, where a brawl in the street or a raid of one volunteer fire company on another volunteer fire company's house that creates a lot of destruction is regarded by a lot of Philadelphians as annoying, unfortunate, but also somewhat expected. And, you know, oh, it's another weekend in the summer there's been another brawl in the street. What happens in spring and summer of 1844 that I think really shocks people because the part is the sustained level of violence where instead of being one Saturday night it's actually going on for several days. And that makes a difference in people's minds that, oh, these people had a chance to sleep on it and they decided they still wanted to go out there and fight. And then also the targets of violence which in both the episodes there's a series of riots in May and a second series in July and in both cases Catholic churches and other Catholic institutions are attacked. And even people who may be very skeptical of the Catholic church for various reasons are appalled to see houses of worship attacked and in some cases destroyed. And so that puts a different meaning on the violence than had it been a fire hall or a political building. Those were bad enough, but a church that really impressed people. Yeah. No, I really got the sense of that, that it was a different kind of violence. It was impacting people in a different way. And yeah, that's some really interesting kind of alliances that form in terms of some people reacting despite having some sympathies towards the nativists. Some people reacting very strongly to houses of worship being burned and stuff like that. Yeah, so that was something that was really interesting that came out of the book to me. The book captures a really compelling moment in regards to urban governance. We see the halting and kind of clumsy efforts on the part of the authorities to restore order to the streets of Philadelphia. We see a variety of institutions that we can think of as broadly their mandate being to make the streets orderly, whether we're talking about militia companies, fire companies, all these sort of institutions that existed in cities like Philadelphia to impose and kind of foster public order. And we see them being either unable to accomplish this or actually helping to perpetuate the unrest. To what degree do you think that these rights helped spur the development of what we might think of as a modern police force? Great. So in the 1840s, police power existed on kind of a spectrum. You could have everyone from just the citizen going out to try to restore order to the sheriff, pulling men off the street and giving them little paper badges or if they were lucky cloth badges that said they were now deputy sheriffs and part of his posse. You had Knight Watchman, whose main job was to light the lamps and cry the hour, but could be pulled into service. You had constables who again were out there serving warrants, not really fighting crime in the way a modern police officer would, but were expected to break up fights. In Philadelphia proper, which at that point was just the central part of what we now know as Philadelphia, there is a small police force, a few dozen men. And all of these could have some effort to subdue violence, again, break up a fight. But if things got really bad, they were not nearly strong enough to do so. And so the backstop for all of this was the volunteer militia. In the United States in the 1840s, there were essentially two militia systems. There was one that theoretically encompassed all men from ages 18 to 45. They would drill once, twice, maybe three times a year, not really very enthusiastic about it, not very skilled, and not people you would want in an emergency. The people who you would call out in an emergency were the volunteers. And these were men who had uniforms and would drill as often as once a week and were excited to be there. They're kind of like the volunteer firefighters of 21st Century America, very enthusiastic, very well trained. And they would come out, and increasingly in the 1830s, they are called out to riot duty, whether it's a strike, whether it's an attack on an African-American community, whether it's some kind of violence, people pulling up the rails of a railroad they don't like. The militia would come out, and for the most part, they don't shoot people. Occasionally, if they're cornered, they'll shoot people that happens in Providence in 1831, and again in Cincinnati in 1842. In New York, they're often clubbing people with the butts of their musket, but not actually firing the muskets. And no one is really sure how bad things would have to be for these folks to use the full power of their firearms against their fellow citizens. And so that's really sort of what's up at stake in Philadelphia in 1844. In the May riots, they come close but don't actually shoot anyone. And in the July riots, the crowd pushes things too far. And at that point, the militia fires into the crowd, and that sparks a really full battle overnight with not only the militia firing their cannon, but also the mob steals some cannon and fire them at the militia. And so it's again a scale of violence that had not been seen in an American city for generations. Right. I mean, I thought that was really interesting. And the whole question of, you know, are these, which, you know, we see come up sometimes with the policing of crowds into the 20th and into the 20th century is the question of like, are they going to, are these troops going to follow orders to, you know, to, you know, to turd on their own, to on their fellow citizens? We saw things like this happen in Eastern Europe in the 1980s and those similar types of questions, like to what degree can we count on the loyalty of the troops to follow orders when it comes to firing on their own citizens. So to see that playing out in the American city, I think was really interesting. And again, I think points to some really interesting questions about, you know, that larger kind of edifice of democracy and how it was functioning during this period. So I found that very, very interesting. One of the things that helps these events kind of leap from the pages of the fires of Philadelphia is the richness of the source material. I think this was something that really jumps out at readers how, you know, things like newspapers and pamphlets and stuff like that, how, you know, how rich a text they provide in terms of helping a historian like yourself kind of describe these events and how they unfolded. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the level of material that you are drawing upon here and the strategies that you employed in working your way through it. Yeah, so this was a book that took me more years than I care to admit, in part because the vast and unexpected richness of the material. So newspapers were quite plentiful. This is the early years of what was called the penny press. So it used to be a newspaper with something of a logarithm, only merchants who really needed to know the prices of cotton and Liverpool would care about that. But by the 1830s, and especially the 1840s, it's relatively inexpensive to print a newspaper, relatively inexpensive to purchase one. So you have more than a dozen. I'm not sure the exact count to think as many as 18 daily newspapers at a time in Philadelphia. Some of them are wigs, some of them are Democrats, some of them are nativists, some of them claim to be neutral but have a certain slant. Some of them have weekly papers representing the Catholics, representing the Presbyterians, representing different religious groups, one representing the militia. It's basically buying for militia officers. Some of these papers no longer exist. You can't find, or at least I couldn't find a single issue of the Irish citizen, which I would love to have read. But others have been preserved. Some have been digitized, some on microfilm, some I had to go to the library, including the Library of Congress to learn over those pages of a 170-year-old paper very delicately and carefully to get those stories. And in some cases, I mean, it's amazing what they would print. They would be trials where they would have people with writing in shorthand. So you have the verbatim testimony of, oh, he said this to me, and I have actual dialogue. I can hear the 1840s. In other cases, they would print official reports. So General Kidwalader's report to his commander, Major General Patterson. In some cases, people would write long letters to the editor or cards as they were sometimes called, saying, hey, this is what happened to me. And then someone would be angry about that, and they would write their own response, either in the same or different newspaper. You'd have editorial duels between the newspapers. So the newspapers are absolutely amazing. I also had the chance to read original manuscripts. General Kidwalader's correspondence is there in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. We have diaries from his artillery commander, Colonel Pleasanton. You have diaries from bystanders and various letters. Many in Philadelphia, others scattered around the country, and I'm very grateful to all the archivists who helped me locate those. And then, of course, doing research in the 21st century, we have digital materials that are searchable in a way that never was before. And so if there is some fairly obscure person caught up in the riot, I could do a search in newspaper databases and genealogical databases, some of them tracing back to the census records in the National Archives. That would give me a sense of who this person was. Did they have money? Did they have an arrest record? You mentioned the injuries and trauma. That comes from a report done by the surgeons of Philadelphia who, for all their sympathy with the wounded, were very excited to have a chance to practice military medicine because they hadn't had a war in a while. They had read about all these wars in Europe and revolutions in Paris where there were new techniques for treating gunshot wounds. And they say, great, here's a chance. And so they are trading stories. And if you ever talk to an emergency room physician, it's kind of appalling how much enjoyment they get out of weird injuries. But so it really was a blend of all kinds of sources. And I'm just so grateful to all the librarians and archivists going back 175 years now who preserved that and made those accessible to me in various forms. That's great, yeah, definitely. And it really jumps out at the reader how much there was and the detail that you were able to go into. So that was really fascinating to see. The riots of 1844 were clearly a spectacular event. As we've talked about already, this was way outside the norm even in a city that was accustomed to a sort of raucous and sometimes violent public life or public sphere. This was really with the burning of churches and stuff like that. This was really kind of outside the norm for people who were experiencing. But for those who experienced this violence firsthand, however, I'm interested in sort of teasing out the links between the kind of violence they countered during the riot and the sort of violence that they might have experienced in their daily lives on the streets of neighborhoods like Kensington and Southwark. So I was wondering how you were sort of thinking through the fact that some of the people involved in these events were no strangers to being involved in things like brawls and street fights and stuff like that. Yeah, so there was a culture of violence in Philadelphia. It was probably the most remarkable of which is probably the volunteer fire companies that would go out to fires and compete to be the first to plug in their hose at the fire plugs, the hydrants as we'd now call them. And if another company got there first, well, maybe they'd cut the hose or maybe they would, you know, try to beat up the other company to get to the hose or if that didn't work, maybe just wait till the next weekend and try to raid that company and steal its hose carriage and get to bits in the street. And then these companies would have unofficial gangs. So you'd have official members of the fire companies who had to be 21 years old or older usually and then some sort of 19- and 20-year-olds hanging around. And if you've ever met a 19- or 20-year-old, you know that they may not have the very best judgment and may seek some excitement on a warm summer night. And so Southwark was notorious for being full of these gangs and if you crossed to the wrong side of the street and didn't notice the chalk mark there, you might be beat up by the local Southwark gang. And many of the participants, you can't know how many, but it seems like many of the participants in the Philadelphia riot, of the nativist riots, who were doing the worst damage. You might have, you know, 1,000 people there, but, you know, it's that core group of 40 or 50 people who are really doing the worst of the damage. Some of them seem to have been associated formerly or informally with these fire companies. And there's actually a, there is a fire company, the Hibernia-Hose House, which obviously was Irish by its name, though it may have had both Protestant and Catholic members, was right there where the Kensington riots start. And as best I can tell, in the middle of the riots that are kind of over politics and religion, some of the nativists say, well, while we're here, let's attack that firehouse. Let's have a firehouse riot in the middle of this larger riot. So, you know, they kind of have these rituals. And one of the things that scholars of rioting have looked at, I know you've looked at this, is the sense of a script, that people know how to have a little fight, how to have a kind of in-your-face parade, and then what happens to escalate that into greater violence. So, you know, someone being a respected leader, being hit with a brick or a bottle or a gunshot, if someone you really like goes down all of a sudden, that will escalate the violence, whether it's a gang or a militia company. If a militia company's captain gets hit with a brick, you can expect bad things from that militia company. They're going to get angry, they're going to be more likely to fire their weapons. The sound of breaking glass is a classic one as well, that that seems to just hit something in our nervous system that will make things go out of control a little more. There are also rituals of de-escalation. And one of the tragic moments, I think, in this story is the Kensington riots really begin on May 6th of 1844. That's a Monday. The next day there's a mass meeting outside what we now call Independence Hall. It was also called the State House then. And some of the nativists are saying, well, let's not do anything today. Let's wait until maybe Thursday. And they had that sense that a cooling off period of 48 or 72 hours could have really good consequences. And it probably could have. It's kind of hard to keep angry that long. Unfortunately, at that meeting, the hotheads say, no, no, let's march right back. Let's do it right now. And they kind of carry the meeting with them. And that's the point where the older politician folks are saying, see you later. We're going to stay here in the shade by Independence Hall. And in fact, most of the prominent nativists are not there. It's the hothead young men who march back to Kensington and renew the violence. So crowds are varied. They're heterogeneous. And you might have a rabble rouser who is making the big speech and is nowhere to be seen when the gun fire starts going. Levin is very much like that. He manages to kind of walk away. And then you have others who are much more in the face. One of the things I was trying to figure out in the book, I'm never not sure if I nailed it down, but whether we've got these sort of two opposing figures, Levin, the rabble rouser and Kedwalliter, the very aristocratic general. And I could never put them in the same place at the same time. I'm never sure they meant to face. And that may be that Levin was kind of skidding away exactly as Kedwalliter is marching in with the troops. Levin was not a physical coward. He did get in fist fights himself. But I think he was also playing the odds. And when he sees a really overwhelming force come, discretion is the better part of valor. Absolutely. Yeah. One of my favorite parts of the book is your epilogue where you follow through some of these figures too, the years after the riot, tracing what comes next in their life in the aftermath of these events. To what degree do you think that the riots of 1844 that you write about were a transformative moment? Do you think that the city of Philadelphia in the years to come, do you think it fundamentally changed at that point? Can you view it as a turning point? Or do you think that that might be too tidy a way to think about it? Well, I think in some ways, the riots are overshadowed by greater events. One of the great ironies here is you've got these nativists who are determined to do whatever they can to limit the Irish Catholic presence in Philadelphia in the summer of 1844, which is the last good potato harvest. Already by the fall of 1844, you've got these little newspaper notices. Again, reading the newspapers and there's this little thing in the corner saying, oh yeah, this weird thing happened up in New England. This farmer thought he had a cellar full of potatoes and when he opened them up, they were all black. And that's the beginning of the blight that hits Ireland in 1845 and then 1846 and then worst of all 1847, you have the Great Hunger. And that presents the United States including in Philadelphia with more Irish immigrants than the nativists could ever have dreamed in their worst nightmares. And so just demographically, that makes some of this irrelevant. They're not going to get rid of the Irish and they're not going to get rid of Irish political power. Though they try, well into the 1850s, there's a resurgent nativist movement known as the Know-Nothings who do try. And then of course, the other thing that happens is the sectional crisis where again, 1844, they're still debating, oh should we annex Texas? You have the election poke, the Mexican war, all of those events that spin the United States towards civil war. And so in retrospect, it's all of the black and white and pro-slavery versus abolitionist violence that seems more important. That said, a couple of things do occur. One is the politicization of anti-immigrant sentiment that again, it rises in the 1840s, takes a little break in the late 1840s, resurges in the 1850s as the Know-Nothing Party. And for the most part, the Know-Nothing Party is absorbed as one of the constituents of the Republican Party. And it's not the major constituent. You have Republicans like Seward and of course Lincoln who are quite interested in integrating Irish Catholics into the body politic. But there are other Republicans who hold the nativist line and are trying well into the 19th century to have a constitutional amendment to prevent public funding of parochial schools and other efforts to restrict immigration. And they're ultimately successful, first with Chinese exclusion and then later with the much broader immigrant exclusion of the 1920s. So this does, I think, help create a nativist line in American politics. And then in terms of policing, the British had had riots in London, in Manchester, and had created this new thing, a uniformed police force that would be kind of halfway between the Posse and the Army. And so the promise of the London police force, that's really the first one that we would recognize as a modern police force, is that it will be more effective than the Posse, but not as sort of military and potentially tyrannical as martial law. And certainly, as there are more and more riots in the United States starting in the 1830s, are getting more and more interested in this, and the Philadelphia riots are part of the impetus, where people are getting even more interested in the London-style force. The New York Police Department has a couple of founding dates, some people say 1843, some people say 1845, but I would say that riots in Philadelphia contributed to that momentum, and then Philadelphia establishes a police force as part of a broader consolidation of the city in 1854. And those are the first two kind of modern police forces in the United States and can be seen, therefore, as ancestors to every uniformed, bad police force you'll see in the United States now. That's a little simplistic, a little linear. Historians look at complexity. There are lots of things that feed into the police forces, but I think certainly urban riots in general and the Philadelphia riots in particular are one of the series of events that make governments think that they want a professional police force all around. Now, that's never going to be big enough to contain a really big riot, so they maintain the volunteer militia that eventually gets renamed the National Guard, and the National Guard, of course, remains the backstop for the police as we saw so frequently in 2020. Yeah, absolutely. I think we've got time to squeeze in one more question. I just want to remind our viewers today that they can put questions into the chat box and we'll ask them, and I'll pass them along to Zachary here. But I want to ask one more question that really I think will jump out to a lot of people who have either read the book or are just hearing you talk about it today. The themes that you touched upon in the fires of Philadelphia, particularly around the relationship between ethnicity and voting rights and the threat that collective violence poses to the social fabric, seem especially pertinent to us here in 2021. Did you realize from the outset of this project that the story of the 1844 riots in Philadelphia would become so timely by the time that it was published? And how do you see the story of 1844 and of this violence? What do you think it offers to those of us trying to make sense of the world here in 2021? So I've been interested in urban riots on and off for decades. I actually first read about them in the early 1990s having seen some of the protests against the first Gulf War, which again seemed very small in comparison to the later wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but at the time there were anti-war protesters and what had been familiar streets suddenly became scenes of certainly contestation and to some extent violence, broken windows, all the rest. And so I thought that urban violence and riots would be interesting. Certainly I had no idea that the book would come out in a period of greater civil unrest than we've seen really since the late 1960s. Riots do tend to happen in waves and again the Philadelphia riots of 1844 were part of a wave that begins around 1831 and that continues into the 1850s and to some extent with the 1863 draft riots in New York and elsewhere. But certainly 2020 was an extent of disorder that we've not seen in decades and that was quite accidental. I did not start those in an attempt to generate interest in the book. That just happened on its own. And then the other surprise was I was writing this book starting again longer than I care to admit but before the most recent rise of immigration as the massive issue it became with the Trump campaign and Trump presidency. I did not foresee that Donald Trump would make immigration and immigration restriction a center point of his successful presidential campaign. It was fascinating in that summer of 2016 when the Democratic National Convention was held in Philadelphia to see Mayor Kenia of Philadelphia talk about my riots on national television and try to suggest I think plausibly that they have lessons for today. So between the resurgence of immigration as an issue and the resurgence not only of urban disorder but also of national guard deployments this book has become just far more relevant than I ever could have imagined. Wow, yeah it really has. And I was thinking of the epilogue of your book being taking on this sort of critical importance now because I think a lot of people are thinking you read a lot of material coming out today talking about how do you rebuild the social fabric after something that in the most dramatic way possible kind of stretches it to the point where it appears incredibly delicate. And so how do you get from that place to the place of a city like Philadelphia being whole parts of it being up in flames during these riots to a matter of time later a city that is largely sort of functional again. So how do you move from those two places? So I think the fact that the social fabric appeared so fundamentally fragile in 1844 and that was not a case a few decades later I think people could probably turn to books like the fires of Philadelphia in a way of sort of piecing that together how consensus can reemerge after a place where it seemed next to impossible for that to happen I mean things seem so fundamentally divided in the city over these questions of citizenship and stuff too. I thought the discussions of things like the potential for voting fraud and stuff like that around 1844 and the way that people were talking about democracy again so pertinent to some of the conversations you see happening today. Just looking here to see if there are any more we still don't have any questions so please do if you're curious about any of this stuff please do share your questions about this. Yeah I'm just coming back to some of these things that we were talking about. I'm really taken this is something that you raised earlier in relation to one of the questions but really taken with what this tells us about how people kind of experienced urban life in the 1840s and I spent a lot of time because you pointed it out several times in your descriptions of it spent a lot of time thinking about young men involved in these things and how the violence kind of spoke to their experience of the city and their place in it and I think it raises so many questions about what their prospects were their experience of really sort of an urban landscape that was in a state of transformation that it probably appeared to them something along the lines of disarray or chaos you think of the processes of industrialization changing their relationship to the workplace and stuff like that. I wondered to the degree to which you thought about sort of the place of young boys in it why this culture of sort of confrontation and violence was so deeply enmeshed in their experience and whether you could sort of write the history of riding in a city like Philadelphia kind of fundamentally as a story of young men. Yeah I think this is again a moment in economic history where things are changing rapidly. The American ideal going back to Thomas Jefferson was of the yeoman farmer owning his own land and being independent. That is beginning to break down pretty quickly but the sort of second best thing is to be your own master and to have your own business and that worked for a while. Again you have these letters from Irish immigrants riding home saying hey you have to work hard here but if you show up here in 1820 there are a lot of opportunities maybe you again buy a cornered grocery or buy a bit of land or maybe you buy a blacksmith shop something that you can do and be your own master and then by the 1830s especially after the start of the panic of 1837 they're beginning to say oh that's not so true anymore and so that throws off a lot of people's life plans and if you again look at the careers of someone like Cornelius Vanderbilt self-made man starts off with one little boat then goes to two little boats and then has a whole fleet it's getting harder and harder to do that and then I think just in terms of psychology the Americans aren't really sure what to do with these males they call them half grown boys the term teenager has not yet been invented so they're calling them boys but again these are 19-20 year olds who we would not necessarily recognize as boys now and they're trying to figure out what to do with them in the hope that someone can control them so in the middle of the riots there's this town meeting and this resolution that goes out saying two things first of all the militia should be able to use whatever force is necessary and everyone knows what that means that means shoot to kill we're going to shoot to kill and then the second clause of the resolution is fathers and masters should keep their half grown boys at home and so they're saying yes we're ready to kill these kids on the other hand they're still just boys they're not fully responsible for their actions dads do your stuff and so again it is a kind of pivot point where you can see the past of the father or the master being in control and then you can see the future of just the rabble and they're going to have to be controlled in their way and eventually institutions are created to try to rope them in longer schooling again better employment and so we begin to move to things like the corporation and other institutions in the immediate aftermath of the riots the one thing that drains the city of some of its most aggressive young men is the Mexican war which you don't want to recommend war as a good public policy necessarily but it does get the kids off the street as they say so some of the worst of the rioters end up in Mexico where they continue committing crimes some of these folks are court-martialed for their various abuses of civilians in Mexico so it doesn't really solve the problem as much as dislocate it far away from Philadelphia but it does become a problem for the cities and again ultimately they expand the police force quite a bit in an effort to keep a lid on the pot and I mean that's so fascinating to think of you know we tend to think of riots as these sort of events that take place in a limited period of time but to think about some of the ways they stretch they stretch across somebody's lived experience somebody on the streets of Kensington in 1844 ended up in Mexico in the war and all the sort of the way that these events get sort of folded into people's lives I've always found to be really fascinating we've unfortunately are running very low on time it's 1250 but I wanted to thank Zachary Shragg not only for speaking with us today but also just for his Fires of Philadelphia the book which makes such a great contribution to a number of different fields whether it's the history of Philadelphia the history of social violence in the United States you know urban history I think this will add there's so many different angles that I think people will want to come to this book from and when they do they're going to find a book that as I said earlier is really engrossing and really takes you to a time and place and a really kind of critical juncture in the history of a great American city so thank you Zachary thank you everybody who joined us today thanks to the National Archives for organizing this event and it was great talking about the book thanks so much for these questions Dan and thanks to everyone for joining