40. The Quaker City: The Forbidden Play of 1844, Part Three

COPYRIGHT PETER SCHMITZ - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

[AITH OPENING THEME]

Peter: Hello there! Welcome back to Adventures in Theater History, as we plunge right into Part Three of our story, the thrilling conclusion of “The Quaker City - the Forbidden Play of 1844.”

[ “Drama is Conflict” Theme]

In another area of my current professional life, I teach theater history to undergraduates. Every time I get to the part of the syllabus where I have to discuss famous 19th Century theater riots, I’m often greeted with some puzzlement by my students. People cared enough about the theater to get violent about it? To run around in the streets, attack actors, throw things at the stage, fight against policemen, even brave gunfire from troops called in to quiet things down?

Well, yes, I say, that did happen. In fact people believed, back then, that they had a certain right to riot in the theater. And my students dutifully jot all this down in their notebooks, and answer my quiz questions and some correctly identify the famous Astor Place Riots of 1849, or the O.P. riots in London of 1809, and of course some don’t. In fact, I’m not really sure I’ve ever really gotten a good handle, myself, on what the heck was going on back then. Nowadays we can imagine organizing a Twitter mob against something that outrages us in the theater, but that’s all online. To actually rip things up, set theaters on fire, break actors' heads and draw blood? Not so much.

I got a different perspective on the topic, really, which I found really helpful, when a friend handed me a book - not a theater history text, but one about social and sports history. Among the Thugs, a 1993 book by the American author Bill Buford, was an attempt to understand the street violence and hooliganism surrounding European - and particularly British - football in the 1980s and 90s. It‘s not a scientific text or historical study, but rather a literary one. Still, in his astounding and disturbing book I think Buford arrives at a significant insight into human nature, and to the essential causes of mob violence - whenever and however it occurred. How is it possible for an individual person within a crowd, as he says, “to cease being an individual, briefly, to disappear into the power of numbers - the strength of them, the emotion of belonging to them”? Although Buford was writing of a very different time and a very different context, I think I can legitimately draw a parallel between English football thugs of the late 20th Century and American theater rioters of the early 19th Century. One of the parallels was that there was in both of these cases a politicized atmosphere, though not always explicitly political direction, to the violence. There was some cause, some grievance, that allowed the crowd to be led, to be organized and to be galvanized. Second, the crowds in both cases were overwhelmingly male, as we’ve noted was the case in the early 19th century theater world. Third, coming right out of that, there was a sense of entitlement on the part of the rioters - this is what we do, this what we have always done, this is where we do it. We smash things and people by ancient right. Fourth, and most importantly, Buford saw that most individuals in the crowd seek the violence, they long for the moment when the normal social barriers come crashing down, the instant when property, propriety, law and order dissolve and nothing remains but one overriding emotion. And what was that emotion, exactly? Says Buford: “It is not panic or fear or anger or revenge. It is exhilaration.” Violence is a potent and intoxicating drug, and because it is generated by the human body it is particularly dangerous and it overwhelms the usual dominant behavior of human beings, which is self-protection. Just as European politicians and police forces of the 1980s and 90s girded themselves against the onslaught of massed football supporters, so did American politicians of the 1840s - with much weaker police forces at their command at the time; and they worried about the possibility of masses of urban rioters at political rallies and at the theater. And with some cause.

The last thing that might be said about the parallel nature of the potential violence at both English football grounds in the 1980s and Philadelphia theaters in the 1840s? That certain businessmen were happy to make money off of it. Because, as we know, conflict creates drama. And many people will pay to be part of that drama.

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On Saturday, November 9th, 1844 Francis Wemyss, manager of the Chestnut Street Theatre, was very happy indeed. His plan to make George Lippard’s play The Quaker City, or the Monks of Monk Hall into an all time box office smash was going splendidly, he felt. The fact that the acquitted murderer Singleton Mercer had torn up the playbills in front of the theater, to the cheers of his friends? Excellent! That Mercer had stormed into the box office, demanding two hundred tickets? Wonderful! That Mercer had publicly said he would cause “a grand row” in the audience on the play’s opening night? Magnificent! Because Wemyss knew that a thousand other people would also buy tickets, just to see that happen. He was only annoyed that his box office treasurer had refused to sell Mercer the tickets. The man was a fool, thought Wemyss. This was a golden opportunity! Take the money. As the scheduled performance of Richard III, starring company member George Jamieson, closed that Saturday night, Wemyss, the Scots-born theatrical manager must have felt as wickedly ingenious as Shakespeare’s Duke of Gloster himself. He was confident that matters would never really come to blows inside the safe confines of “Old Drury” - but that his fortunes as a theatrical manager would surely be restored.

He further felt that legally, he was in the clear. His friend Ashbell Green, a lawyer for the city of Philadelphia had thoroughly looked over the script. Wemyss and his stage manager Charles Durang had already carefully excised any reference in the script that might be seen as directly referring to any prominent Philadelphia citizens. There was nothing actionable or libelous in it, ruled Green. So, even though many Philadelphians knew that some characters based on them were in the novel, no one could sue to stop the play. His lawyers and his friends - including Louis Godey, the publisher of the most popular magazine in America, Godey’s Ladys’ Book - kept assuring him he was legally in the clear. So if legal measures couldn’t put a halt to things, what about mob violence, which had so often recently wracked the city of Philadelphia?

Threats of rioters, led by Singleton Mercer and his group of young Philadelphia toughs, tearing down the Chestnut Street Theater, sacking it, were being openly made all over town that Sunday, November 10th - a day on which by local ordinance no plays could be performed - and so curious people naturally gathered round the playbills for Quaker City being that were being posted on walls and placards all over town. They were “magnets of universal attraction,” Wemyss later recalled. “Wherever one was posted, there was a crowd perusing it.” The prospects for a full house were guaranteed, he chuckled to himself. Meanwhile, all that Sunday, supposedly a day of rest, the actors of his company continued to study their new roles, and prepare for the rigors of the coming week. Everyone was in a state of anticipation that something momentous was going to happen at the theater on Monday. According to Wemyss: “The excitement was building every hour.”

At two pm Sunday afternoon, Wemyss received a stern note from Peter McCall, the new Mayor of Philadelphia, requesting to see him at his private home in two hours time, “on a matter that would brook no delay.” When Wemyss showed up at the mayor’s house, another copy of the printed play bill in his hand, McCall received him with what Wemyss described as “bland courtesy.” Pushing aside Wemyss’ copy of the advertisement, M and quietly told him that he had already seen it, and that in his opinion it was libelous to Mr. Mercer. But it was Sunday, after all, and according to social and religious custom, they could do no real business that day. However, McCall further instructed Wemyss to meet him at his office at 9:00 am the next day.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

This was why, on the morning of Monday November 11th, Wemyss presented himself at the mayor’s office, this time with a complete copy of the play script for The Quaker City in his hand. In the 1840s, by the way, Philadelphia’s city government still operated out of the old State House on Independence Square, so it was an easy walk over to 5th and Chestnut St. for the theatrical manager. He was expected at the theater itself, just a block away, at 10 am for rehearsals. His stage manager, Charles Durang, who had quite enough trouble on his hand dealing with the sets and the other actors, stayed at the theater, preparing for the opening day’s rehearsal. Wemyss’ partner, Mr. Pratt, was coming down from his home in Bristol, up the Delaware, and was not expected in town until 2 pm.

“I met the mayor, according to his appointment, and offered him the play to read. This he declined” wrote Wemyss. (Throughout here, by the way, I am relying mostly on Wemyss’ and Charles Durang’s own accounts of events. There are no other first hand narrations that I can find. Durang, for his part, mildly noted that it was hardly surprising that the mayor did not relish the prospect of sitting down that morning and reading a five act play that morning.)

Wemyss' account continued:  “I then proposed that [the mayor] walk up to the theater with me to see the rehearsal, that he might judge whether there was anything objectionable; this he too declined. He said he did not doubt that everything was as I had represented it; but that we had just escaped from riot and bloodshed - were in the height of a popular election - the blood of all parties warm - . . . that he appealed to me as the father of a family, not to commit an act which might cause me regret . . should riot and bloodshed follow from it.” Furthermore, stressed Mayor McCall, he would not employ the police of the city to help Wemyss, should any trouble break out.

Wemyss (secretly pleased at all this official attention yet lack of official action forbidding the performance) placated the mayor. He was not at all worried of any trouble, he assured him, and excused himself to attend rehearsals down the street. Walking into the theater he was greeted nervously by Charles Durang. “Well, what’s the news? Should we go on rehearsing?” asked the stage manager.

“Certainly!” replied Wemyss. “It is my determination to go with the performance of the night. I shall wait for Mr. Pratt’s arrival at two o’clock, before I make any final arrangements.” 

And so the normal business of rehearsals, as it was practiced in 19th century theater, continued. The large cast of two dozen actors moved about the stage as needed, scripts in hand, anxiously and yet efficiently learning how their lines and their blocking worked together. Durang’s own wife, Mary Durang, was in the play, playing “Mrs. Arlington, an affectionate old lady.” Francis Wemyss had cast himself as the villain Gus Lorrimer, described in the bill for the show as “a heartless libertine.” The company’s leading man George Jamieson was playing Byrnewood Arlington, “a young merchant of an old firm” - who as in the novel the play was based upon, was an obvious stand-in for Singleton Mercer. His father, Old Arlington was played by a Mr. Stafford, while his sister Mary Arlington (an obvious counterpart to the unfortunate Sarah Mercer) was played by the company ingenue, Miss McBride. Some of the players had more than one part to learn. George Mossop, the husband of the former Louisa Lane, was cast both in the deliciously hideous role of The Devil Bug, and also as an aristocratic monk of Monk Hall, Algernon Fitz-Cowles, described in the playbill as “in one word, the greatest Humbug in this Age.” While another character man, Mr. Horn, doubled as both a “black waiter in the Oyster Cellar” and as the Irish “Dusty Bobert, an Ash Collector.” There were many other similar roles drawn from the text of Lippard novel, including a prostitute called “Long Haired Bess” and the mysterious Astrologer who predicted the final fatal encounter of the plot, as well as extras and supernumeraries playing various “loafers, thieves, pickpockets and murderers.” So you know, it was going to be quite a show. 

But as the actors and the stagehands attempted to do their run through though that Monday, they kept getting interrupted. Every few minutes, it seemed, another message was being brought in for Mr. Wemyss. Some letters promised the destruction of the theater, others begged him to stop the show to prevent bloodshed and riot. “All these messages and missives, full of warlike declarations to the knife, were sent to the stage,” reported Durang, “till revolutionary ideas infected the actors.” 

Then people began to show up in person. Judge Conrad wanted further reassurances from his old friend Wemyss that he was NOT mentioned in the play. Mr. Evans, president of the theater board of directors, nervously advised Wemyss that they should perhaps withdraw the play, an opinion tensely seconded by his personal lawyer, Mr. Guillou. By this point, as you can imagine, the actors were beginning to wonder if all this play they were rehearsing was really going to be worth it. Worse, outside on Chestnut Street, ominous crowds were beginning to gather. Singleton Mercer had finally prevailed upon the box office to sell him a block of 25 tickets, and he was purportedly passing them out to his friends, with instructions to ‘be ready’. Others reported that he had actually gotten a hold of up to 300 tickets, and had already distributed them to ‘the regular crowd of Southwark rioters.”

And then at one pm, in walked the General! State militia officer General George Cadwalader, a lawyer himself, who had married into the powerful and wealthy Mease Butler family, and was agent of the board of governors of the theater, and commander of the Philadelphia Greys regiment, demanded that they stop the play. Now things were getting serious. Cadwalader’s dramatic entrance was immediately followed by another letter from Mayor McCall, who, alarmed by the growing crowd he could clearly see gathering down the block from his office - and by Mercer’s threats - once again made it clear he thought the theater had to cancel the show. Although this note was phrased as a ‘request’, clearly this was an order.

Wemyss could feel his plans crashing around him. Instructing Durang to keep on with rehearsals, he desperately hurried back up the block to City Hall. He had an alternate proposition to the mayor. It was actually a really good show, he argued. You’d like it if you just gave it a chance. So would everyone, in fact! Why not let the curtain go up tonight on The Quaker City, and we’ll just take the play in sections, scene by scene. If there was any opposition from the audience after any scene, we’ll bring the curtain down and stop the play. But if nothing happens, we’ll just go on to the next scene, and repeat the process.  . . . But the mayor was not interested in that idea. Mercer and his friends would surely have already started a riot by then, he said. “Then why not simply arrest Mercer now, in order to keep the peace?” begged the manager. “Because, Mr. Wemyss, I really think you have struck the first blow in your play-bill,” replied the mayor. Which, you know, to my mind is a really odd position for such a highly-trained lawyer as McCall to take. Even Charles Durang (writing later) couldn’t see the logic behind it, though he himself was definitely ready to see the play canceled just to prevent the potential riot.

Wemyss, at that point, finally relented, only requesting that McCall make it clear that it was on his authority the play was stopped, and exonerating himself and Pratt from all blame. Wemyss returned to the theater, pushed his way through the crowd outside, and told the company the play was being withdrawn and that they should all start preparing to perform instead an innocuous comedy entitled Grandfather Whitehead. At which the actors all wearily threw their scripts upon the floor, with some justification, wondering why they had put in all the work of learning the lines to Lippard’s crazy play in the first place.

The crowd outside the theater, whipped up by all the rumors flying around town, had now grown quite enormous, filling Chestnut Street from Sixth to Seventh and spilling around the corner up Sixth - for those of you who know the city of Philadelphia, this would be directly across from where the Liberty Bell Pavilion is now and stretch up Chestnut to the end of the next block. Everyone in the city government in 1844 could quite easily see this crowd from their office windows up the block. The city police force headquarters was even closer - right there on the corner - and a thin line of officers were standing in front of the building holding back the surging throng from the doors.   But who exactly was in this mob of individuals? 

 Oddly, not a single account says. Which tracks with what Bill Buford says about violent crowds are described - they are always somebody else, they are never “us”. We can guess, based upon what we know about theater audiences of the day, that on an individual level, most of the folks milling about on Chestnut Street were young white males between the ages of 18 and 30. Who else would have the time, the energy, the privilege, the interest to spend up to six hours in a potentially dangerous situation, just to see what might happen, and to be there if something suddenly did happen? In terms of class some might have been quite well off, part of the regular audience of the Chestnut and interested in defending its reputation, and theirs, against Lippard’s libels. Others were certainly supporters of Singleton Mercer. Some were likely fans of George Lippard’s book, which by now had released three installments, and wanted to ensure that the play was allowed to go on. One can imagine disputes and arguments breaking out all afternoon long. It is clear that Wemyss and McCall and Durang found the mass of people quite alarming, anyway, in light of recent Philadelphia history, and what had come close to happening just a few days before, on the recent election night. It was getting dangerously close to the point where people begin to lose their individual identity within the mass of others. Waiting for that spark, that first moment when the rules dissolve. 

Suddenly, the large playbills announcing The Quaker City were once again ripped off the boards in front of the building - was this the moment? Everyone tensed. But immediately it was clear that it was not people from the crowd, not Singleton Mercer, but members of the theater’s staff who had removed the offending pieces of paper. The show was canceled. The sense of urgency deflated and the crisis had passed. In the end, it was Francis Wemyss who caved in the face of all the public pressure, and who had to return everyone’s money. Even Singleton Mercer wanted a refund for the 25 tickets he had bought, much to Wemyss’ indignation.

Where, you may well ask, was the crusading author George Lippard in all this mess? Well, it’s not clear. According the account of one enemy of his (possibly the writer Rufus Wilmot Griswold) who wrote a sneering account of the days events in Philadelphia for the New York Herald published under the pseudonym “Peter Peep,” Lippard was in quiet ecstasies over all the fuss he had created, while the high society toffs of Philadelphia were aghast at all this sordid degradation of their dear “Old Drury.” Many years later, another writer, a fawning biographer of Lippard’s, would claim that Lippard had been striding defiantly among the crowd outside the theater that evening, wrapped in a voluminous cloak and armed with a sword cane, and that Mayor McCall had personally come out and begged the young writer to cancel the play in the interest of public safety. According to this story, when Lippard graciously gave his consent, the mayor then spoke to the crowd with Lippard at his side and everybody quietly went home. I think we can set aside this fanciful version of events, because according to everyone else the mayor never made an appearance, and some of the crowd, perhaps the disappointed fans of the novel, was still milling outside the theater until eleven pm that night. There is another story that Lippard later blamed city attorney Ashbell Green for the cancellation of the play, and that he even publicly struck Green with a whip. But I’m not sure that really happened either. One thing is clear: nobody went inside to see Grandfather Whitehead, or the sad little afterpiece that followed it, entitled He is Not a Miss performed by Chestnut’s company that night. Indeed, according to Wemyss, the theater was mostly empty of audience members for the next two weeks. But, you know, at least there was no riot in Philadelphia. Not this time, anyway.

[MUSIC TRANSITION]

And then what? What was the aftermath? Well, George Lippard quickly got over the cancellation of his play. In fact, he seems to have been rather inspired by it - the whole affair further confirmed his attitude about the corruption of Philadelphia society and the ensuing publicity, of course, did him a world of good. Every subsequent installment of the novel The Quaker City, as he continued to turn it out, flew off the booksellers’ shelves, and when it was finally issued in a complete edition, it became the best selling American novel ever - only to be outstripped in the next decade by Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Lippard wrote many other works subsequently, including all sorts of patriotic historical stories - it's from him that we get the tale of the Liberty Bell ringing while the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, something which never actually happened. He also founded a secret benevolent society, sort of an anti-Monks’ Hall, called The Brotherhood of the Union which had thousands of members all over the country. In 1849 he wrote a fictionalized account of a real event, the California House Riots in the Moyamensing neighborhood, when white mobs led by criminal gangs and volunteer fire companies once again battled with Blacks in South Philadelphia streets during yet another tense election night. His story was named after one of the gangs, known as The Killers.  Lippard gained considerable income and influence from his writing career, but like most of his family he did not live long to enjoy it. By 1854 he died of tuberculosis at the age of 35, preceded by his wife and his only child.

Peter McCall served out his two-year term as Philadelphia’s mayor, and afterwards served several terms on the Philadelphia City Council. He became a highly successful lawyer, and a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

George Dallas served his four-year term as Vice President of the United States, spending most of his term presiding over a closely divided Senate. Often he had to perform his constitutional duty as the tie-breaking vote. In 1848, much to the displeasure of his constituents back in Pennsylvania, he was forced by party loyalty to be the decisive vote in lowering national tariffs - even though he knew this vote would effectively end any prospect of him ever being elected President himself one day. As soon as he cast his vote, he wrote a hurried note to his wife:  "If there be the slightest indication of a disposition to riot in the city of Philadelphia, owing to the passage of the Tariff Bill, pack up and bring the whole brood to Washington.”

Singleton Mercer, the onetime hero or murderer, depending on how you look at him, most vanished into obscurity mostly spent in the family business or in Philadelphia taverns. But in 1855 he did perform one public-spirited act in his life, when he volunteered to be part of a relief team sent by the city of Philadelphia to Portsmouth, Virginia, which was experiencing a yellow fever epidemic. However, no sooner did he arrive on the scene that he himself died of yellow fever, also at the age of 35. His remains were eventually moved back to Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery, where in a famous local irony, they ended up resting just a short walk away from the grave of Mahlon Heberton, upon whom he took his vengeance on the Camden ferry in 1843.

Charles Durang, continued his career as a stage manager and a dancing master in Philadelphia. He also became an author, publishing Durang’s Terpsichore or Ball Room Guide in 1848 and The Fashionable Dancer’s Casket in 1856. And as we know, he ended up writing a regular series of articles in the Philadelphia Tribune, which became collected into the six volume History of the Philadelphia Stage. His son E.F. Durang became a famous architect, designing many theaters and churches in Philadelphia, though his 1854 plans for the proposed Academy of Music were rejected by the committee. We’ve already spoken about how that building was deliberately constructed with a mind to quelling some of the endemic violence in the city of Philadelphia, healing social issues with the uplifting and calming values of Art.

Francis Courtney Wemyss, for his part, struggled through the rest of the 1844-45 theatrical season at the Chestnut Street Theatre. He tried multiple ways of attracting crowds and appeasing his audiences - he booked everything from minstrel troops to New York stars, and even staged the first real American grand opera, Leonora, by the composer William Henry Fry, but nothing really worked. By the end of the year he was broke and ended up moving to New York City, where he had the sad pleasure of watching a bastardized version of The Quaker City done at the Bowery Theatre, which he hardly recognized from the play he had wanted to stage in Philadelphia. At least that's what he wrote in his memoirs, entitled Twenty-Six Years in the Life of an Actor, produced in an effort to raise some needed funds for himself and his family. Though its narration of this book is a bit garbled at points, it has become highly useful to theater historians of the era, and his account of his experience with The Quaker City, or Monks of Monk Hall provides the climax of the book, which was published in 1846.

Wemyss’ other major work, the compendious Chronology of the American Stage came out in 1852. Frustratingly, neither of these books contains Francis Wemyss' account of what it was really like to be the object of mob violence. Because Francis Wemyss, amazingly, was actually in the cast of William Macready’s Macbeth that fateful night in New York City in May of 1849, when the most amazing and famous American theater riot of all time took place. He was playing the role of King Duncan, and so would have been offstage, his character already safely murdered before the angry mob, many of them partisans of Macready’s rival - Philadelphian Edwin Forrest - arrived and started heaving paving stones at the windows. Wemyss would have heard them actually try to shut down a show and to burn the theater, while the militia shot down people in the streets outside. Maybe the experience changed his mind about stoking public controversy just to sell tickets, anyway. Let’s hope so. 

The script of the play The Quaker City, or the Monks of Monk Hall has unfortunately been lost - much to the disappointment of many theater history scholars and American literature PhD candidates. I suppose that all sets were discarded, too, or recycled for some other piece. Just about ten years ago, however, enterprising researchers discovered one single surviving copy of the original playbill, hidden away in a box at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Across the top, although it’s hard to read - as much as I’ve tried I can only make out about half of it - somebody (possibly Wemyss, possibly Durang) has scrawled, in ink: “This piece was not acted. Public Opinion and the Authorities of Phila forbade its [something something] being presented.” I think that’s what it says, anyway. Farther down, you can definitely make out; “riot was threatened” and “the piece as it was commissioned was withdrawn. The theatre was closed for a few nights.”

Well, that’s the end of that dramatic confrontation in the streets of Philadelphia over a play, but it was certainly not the last! We’ve got a few more to tell you about. We’ll continue our season of “Drama is Conflict” when we bring you  the story of the uproar over the violently racist play The Clansman, the forerunner to the famous movie Birth of a Nation in the early 20th Century. It’s going to be another hair-raising narrative, believe you me. So go rest up while we get this next one ready for you.

[“DRAMA IS CONFLICT CLOSING MUSIC]

 I’m Peter Schmitz, and our music and sound engineering are by Christopher Mark Colucci. Thank you, once again, for your kind attention, and for coming along on another Adventure in Theater History: Philadelphia.

[3ITH END THEME]

COPYRIGHT PETER SCHMITZ - ALL RIGHT RESERVED