38. The Quaker City: The Forbidden Play of 1844, Part One

COPYRIGHT PETER SCHMITZ - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

[AITH OPENING THEME]

Peter: Hi everyone! Welcome back Adventures in Theater History, and to our episode, “The Quaker City - the Forbidden Play of 1844: PART ONE!”

[“Drama is Conflict” Musical Theme]

Philadelphia in the early 1840s was a city under constant threat of civil disruption. The nation-wide banking panic of 1837 had led to a long economic downturn, and wages in the city were driven steadily downward for the next seven years. The artisan and working classes of the city held considerable resentment against its wealthy classes, especially those who led the financial institutions and the failing banks that had led to their impoverishment. True, some white working-class resentment was directed against the city Blacks, and also against the Anti-Slavery Society. But resentment could also be mixed with class resentment, as many wealthy people of the city were known to support abolitionist causes. It was part of what led to the anti-Abolition mob to burn down Pennsylvania Hall in 1838.

We’ve already covered in the podcast how this ongoing economic trouble had helped cause a constant turnover in the management of the city’s theaters. Whether they were running the Chestnut Street Theatre, the Arch Street Theatre, the National, or the Walnut Street Theatre, one manager after another failed to thrive in the turbulent business climate. And we’ve also covered how Edwin Forrest, who distinctly identified with the common working man in America, built up a repertoire of plays like The Gladiator and Jack Cade, whose heroes rallied the masses and fought against the aristocrats and the power elites. The complete failure of Nicholas Biddle’s Second Bank of the United States - Philadelphia’s flagship financial institution - in early 1841 - had shaken the confidence of all classes in the city. One Philadelphian wrote at the time: “If a volcano had opened its fiery jaws in our midst, or an earthquake had shaken the firmest edifices to their foundations, the popular terror could not have been more complete.” 

There were a lot of visions of calamity, in fact, wherever one looked, in those days. In religious culture, a wave of "Millerism" swept the country, as the prophecies of William Miller, leader of what would become the Seventh Day Adventist Church, predicted that the Second Coming of Christ would happen in October of 1843 - then he moved it to March of 1844, and then October of 1844.  . . . Finally, in what became known to many as “The Great Disappointment,” Miller and his followers conceded that the world had not ended after all, and Christ had not returned to Earth. (Sorry! Spoiler Alert.) This did not do much good for the circulation of the local version of William Miller’s newspaper, called Signs of the Times, which was regularly published in Philadelphia, and had helped to whip up the eschatological anxiety and excitement. Other Philadelphia publications, like the sensationalist highly popular penny paper The Spirit of the Times, (perhaps names in response to Miller’s paper) mocked both the foolish followers of religious sects - and the corrupt preachers and politicians that they accused of fanning the flames of fear. [04:06]

But it wasn’t all false prophecy. Throughout the early 1840s class, racial and religious resentment often led to outright violence in Philadelphia’s streets. Along with the surging number of caricatures of African-Americans in the minstrel show halls, Black people were also the victims of hostile white mobs. In August of 1841, an African-American parade celebrating Jamaican Independence Day (and the recent end of slavery in other British-held islands in the Caribbean) along Lombard Street was assaulted by Irish-American rioters near Mother Bethel Church. Over three days of attacks, the Second African Presbyterian Church nearby, Smith's Hall (a meeting place for Abolitionists), and numerous homes of Black Philadelphians in the neighborhood were looted and burned. None of the White working class attackers were ever held to account by the administration of Mayor John Morin Scott, who was a prominent member of the Whig Party, and part of the upper-class leadership of the city.

Three years later, Mayor Scott would also preside over the even better-known Nativist Riots, when competing mobs of Catholics and the Protestant-led “Native American Party” would roil the working-class districts of Kensington and Southwark. St. Augustine Catholic Church in Kensington was burned in May. The state militia, led by the prominent Philadelphian George Cadwalader, was called out to quell even more riots in July  - and then was itself attacked defending St. Philip Neri Church. At least fifteen people were killed and dozens wounded. 

These Philadelphia riots had gained national attention and were used as an issue in the 1844 U.S. Presidential election, with the Democratic Party condemning both the Whigs and the growing Native American Party. Especially ardent Democrats (known as “Locofocos”) even accused their main rival, the Whigs, of secretly supporting the anti-Catholic and nativist movement. This helped the Democratic candidate, James K. Polk, in his victory - though it was a narrow election. 

But a few weeks earlier, in Philadelphia’s October 1844 local elections, which were held separately, the Whig candidate Peter McCall was elected Mayor. Under the rules of that time, the winning candidate immediately took office. So by November 1844, McCall was in charge of maintaining public order in the city of Philadelphia during the national elections, assisted only by the small semi-professional municipal police force. As before, in a real emergency he could ask for help from the Pennsylvania state militia, controlled by Cadwalader and officers who were mostly fellow Whigs. Emotions continued to run high in The Quaker City. (A name that journalists around the country used for Philadelphia, even though few members of the Society of Friends ever sought public office anymore). [07:16]

The city’s theaters were the next flashpoint, in fact they were frequently the venues where these extreme feelings were expressed. On November 4th, 1844 an item in The Whig Standard, a party paper published in Washington DC, printed an article that I found about an uproar a few days previously at the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. It seemed that Dan Rice, the reigning king of blackface comedy, had brought his highly popular “Jim Crow” character to the Chestnut. At one point in the evening, he also brought a white raccoon onto the stage with him. Though this was an unsubtle joke about the Whig candidate for President, Henry Clay (the Kentucky senator whose longtime political nickname was “the Old Coon”). The word was only just starting to gain traction in America as a racist epithet, and the comic juxtaposition of these two different usages - because remember, Rice was standing there in full blackface makeup and a ragged costume, in character as an African American stable hand from Kentucky -  this remark evidently hit home with the politically mixed audience of Philadelphians. Wrote the reporter: “The Locofocos groaned, the Whigs shouted and huzzaed, and a scene of noisy confusion followed. The coon was then withdrawn but for some time the audience would not allow the play to proceed. The whole affair was disgraceful, for we cannot think that Mr. Rice meant any political allusion, though it must be allowed that the introduction of the animal was rather indiscreet.” Clearly the spirit of incipient riot from earlier in 1844 had clearly not yet died down in Philadelphia.

Minstrel shows, as we know, were just starting their rise to dominance in the popular theater of the day. But we have never really discussed how elaborately produced disaster melodramas were also common on the stages of the Walnut, National, and Arch Street Theatres. Known for their scenery and spectacle, these melodramas often depicted cataclysmic events - like volcanoes, riots, and even sea monsters. These dramas often cast working class characters as heroes, usually ending in heroic martyrdom.  For example, English playwright Joseph Jones’ play The Surgeon of Paris, depicting the St. Bartholomew Day’s Massacre in 16th century France, was played numerous times at the Walnut and other theaters during this period. Behind the production of this and other such plays was often the actor and theatrical manager Francis Wemyss. (Though his name - WEMYSS - looks like it should be said as “WEM-iss” by the way, it should properly be pronounced “WEEMZ”, as it is in his native Scotland, so that’s what I’m going to do from now on.)

Wemyss came to Philadelphia in 1824, and was well known for his elegant style of dress - always in the latest London fashions. His striking clothes, in fact, had led to him being immediately employed by Warren and Wood’s Chestnut Street Company. He was hired to star in a series of “Tom and Jerry” plays which purportedly showed the amusing life of Tom and Jerry, young London gents, as they slummed it among both the aristocratic clubs and the dives of the lower classes in the city. Wemyss was to become a fixture in Philadelphia theater in the years afterwards, and eventually he turned to management as well. Though he occasionally managed theaters as far away as Baltimore, New York, and Pittsburgh, usually he would take over the operations of Philadelphia’s Walnut, National, and the Arch Street Theaters.

These three houses were the popular places of entertainment for the working class and artisan classes in Philadelphia. Their programming was usually in stark opposition to the refined and high class operas, ballets and plays being put on at the Chestnut Street Theatre, which was favored by the upper classes. In 1841, the publication The Dramatic Mirror reported that “The Chesnut [sic] has a distinct audience from the Walnut - the one don’t go to the others.”

Always attuned, therefore, to popular tastes, Wemyss particularly excelled at staging exciting disaster spectacles - in which exploding volcanoes or collapsing buildings would be featured, or melodramas that expressed the ‘dark underside’ of city life in London, New York, or Paris. These sort of entertainments were rather an inverse of the good-natured "Tom and Jerry" plays that he had begun his career with. Instead of showing the colorful and jolly times in urban nightlife, these melodramas revealed a city's supposed secrets and its moral corruption. In October 1843, for example, Wemyss staged at the National Theatre a melodramatic version of the French playwright Eugene Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris. As theater historian Charles Durang described this piece, it was full of gothic scenic effects. “Thunder roared, lightning flashed, and mock human blood flowed in the kennels. By a curious device, the moon’s rays were made at night to reflect the blood of humanity mantling the waters of the Seine . . . The multitude gaped at it in wonder.” Even Charlotte Cushman, in her one season of managing the Walnut Street Theatre in that time, had not been above staging such popular pieces. That same month (October of 1843) she had appeared in ‘the Romantic Spectacle’ entitled The Last Days of Pompeii  - the classic exploding volcano play if there ever was one - along with her younger sister Susan.

To top it all off, there were crimes being committed throughout the city that disturbed the public’s peace of mind in this era. Not only was there increasing street-level gang violence - often tied to the fierce rivalries of Philadelphia’s famous volunteer fire companies - but there were crimes in the upper levels of society, too. 

In February of 1843, a socially prominent young man of town, Mahlon Hutchinson Heberton, son of the late Dr. John C. Heberton, was violently murdered.  Young Heberton had been a real “sport,” a denizen of the city’s billiard halls, social clubs, and drinking establishments. The paper The Spirit of the Times described him as “rather tall, extremely well-formed, remarkably full of chest, was always dressed in the extreme of fashion (corseted, padded, etc., to a nicety), had dark hair, and brilliant and rakish eye, wore a moustache, and carried a gold-headed cane." One evening Mahlon Heberton had secretly taken 16 year-old Sarah Mercer, the trusting and socially inexperienced daughter of a wealthy South Philadelphia merchant, to a ‘house of assignation’ and had either raped or seduced her. There he left her, and the poor girl was missing for days afterwards. Her frantic family, hearing rumors of Heberton’s involvement in the matter, had him arrested. But the young man arrogantly denied all knowledge of the girl's whereabouts, and was eventually released.

Finally, Sarah was found, and when her older brother Singleton Mercer, who had been desperately searching the city for her, found out what had happened, first he threatened to kill her; and when he was prevented from doing that, made it widely known that he would kill her assailant, Mahlon Heberton, instead. Mahlon Heberton, at that point, wisely decided to skip town, and quietly had himself and his luggage loaded onto a heavily curtained carriage which drove to the Philadelphia riverfront and rolled onto the John Fitch, a ferryboat that took passengers across the Delaware River to Camden, New Jersey. But unknown to Heberton, Singleton Mercer had tailed him onto the boat, and at an opportune moment Singleton stuck a pistol into the carriage and fired, killing Heberton almost immediately.

Mercer immediately surrendered to New Jersey authorities, but when his trial was held a few months later, his sister’s testimony about the motivation for his actions sunk the prosecution's case. In a torrent of tears, Sarah Mercer related the distressing details of how Heberton had met her and wooed her, and led her into a strange house, where a Negro woman had directed them to a room which held only a bed. According to her, he had raped her at gunpoint. The jury took less than half an hour to acquit Singleton Mercer, and upon his return to Philadelphia he was hailed as a hero. Soon Singleton was walking the streets of Philadelphia once again, now nearly as prominent a social figure in the bars, billiard halls and theaters of Philadelphia as Mahlon Heberton had been before him.

Some of the local papers joined the chorus of voices praising Singleton Mercer, but others, including a young journalist, an intense young man with long backswept hair named George Lippard, who had covered the trial for a paper called the Citizen Soldier, thought the whole affair had revealed the depths of depravity that could be found beneath the veneer of supposedly polite society in the Quaker City. And he intended to rip the lid off that veneer.

So, into this entire roiling cultural and political climate we’ve been discussing, stepped one of the most remarkable historical figures ever produced by Philadelphia, to my mind. Who was George Lippard? And what does he have to do, by the way, with the history of theater?

But here, in proper serial form, which Lippard would approve of, we will leave you in suspense!

[MUSIC CUE - Closing theme of “Drama is Conflict”]

 I’m Peter Schmitz, and our theme music and sound engineering is by Christopher Mark Colucci. Be sure to tune in next time, when we bring you Part Two of “The Quaker City” - The Forbidden Play of 1844, here on Adventures in Theater History: Philadelphia! 

[AITH END THEME]