Boundaries of Responsibility: Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and the Pennsylvania Riot Damage Law, 1834–1880

Pennsylvania stands in the forefront of a great many trends in American history, not all of which brought honor to the commonwealth. In the 1830s and ’40s, and again in 1877, Pennsylvania experienced rioting to an unrivaled extent in varying combinations of cause, frequency, violence, damages, and death. Beginning in 1834, Philadelphia would experience an ongoing series of riots for more than ten years, punctuated by the horrific burning of Pennsylvania Hall in 1838 and culminating in the massive nativist outburst beginning in May 1844 at the Nanny Goat Market. In the railroad strikes of 1877, Pennsylvania led the nation once again. Although the strikes and related violence began in Martinsburg, West Virginia, Cumberland, Maryland, and Baltimore, those outbursts were soon overshadowed by violence and death in Pennsylvania, most notably in Pittsburgh, but also in Reading, Easton, and Scranton.

Figure 1.

Harper’s Weekly gave its readers a vivid depiction of the industrial violence in Pittsburgh in 1877.

The major episodes of 1844 and 1877 have received ample attention from historians, as has the burning of Pennsylvania Hall. In this study, the riots themselves will serve to introduce an issue that has been largely ignored: how Pennsylvania’s legislature and courts assessed responsibility for the damages from these riots, and how laws and precedents from the 1830s and 1840s resulted in a major political and legal struggle over the settlement of Pittsburgh’s damages after 1877. The continual resort to riot in Philadelphia in the 1830s caused the legislature, seemingly unconcerned with the possibility of rioting elsewhere in the state, to make the County of Philadelphia responsible for property damage from riots. As rioting persisted into the 1840s, the commonwealth’s courts handed down numerous judgments against the county. At the western end of the state in Allegheny City, disorder related to an 1848 strike led the legislature to extend responsibility for riot damages to Allegheny County in 1849. That law would lie in wait for twenty-eight years until 1877, when the rioting prompted by state militia troops firing into a crowd supporting the railroad strike on July 21 resulted in at least twenty-five dead while leaving an area of more than forty square blocks of Pittsburgh in ruins.

The implications of the law of 1849 would touch off a little-known political struggle in the Pennsylvania legislature over where the responsibility for such disorder lay, ironically uniting Pittsburgh and Philadelphia legislators in an unsuccessful effort to shift most of the costs for Pittsburgh’s disorder onto the state. That debate can be viewed as a statewide contemplation of the boundaries of community.

Long before the founding of the United States, English law had established the principle of community responsibility for preventing disorder and paying for its costs. But that principle emerged from an era in which crowd action reflected a “moral economy,”¹ where mob violence operated in a quasiritualistic way toward enforcing a collective interpretation of communal values against people, for instance, who to make a profit would ship food out of a region in times of hunger. For their part, ruling authorities saw rioting as something they could manipulate and ultimately control, confident that disorder would stay within traditional boundaries.

But the social context of rioting changed rapidly in the new American nation. A multiplicity of interests competed ever more vigorously with less and less agreement on common values in an increasingly open, democratic political system. As both the frequency and intensity of rioting grew by the 1830s and 1840s, a less secure set of economic and political leaders came to view rioting as utterly illegitimate whatever its goal, and they sought to eliminate it by more vigorous policing along with laws like Pennsylvania’s proclaiming community responsibility for damages.² But the violence of 1877 caused some of Pennsylvania’s leading urban and corporate interests to grope toward a more nuanced approach by arguing that the state should pay most of the enormous bill for damages from Pittsburgh’s rioting. Perhaps realizing that such...