MAY 9: A CITY UNDER MILITARY RULE
Dawn After the Fire
Thursday morning rose over a city stunned into silence. The night before, flames had devoured St. Michael’s Church, its rectory, the Sisters of Charity seminary, and dozens of Irish homes. The ash was still warm. Columns of smoke curled from shattered rooflines. Soldiers stood in knots along Second Street, rifles slung, watching over a neighborhood that had been emptied of its people.
In those early hours, the civilian government effectively ceased to function. The only real authority left in Philadelphia County was the military.
General Robert Patterson, commander of the Pennsylvania militia, assumed command shortly after sunrise. Sheriff Morton McMichael and Mayor John M. Scott, having lost all practical control, turned their powers over to him. Patterson responded with orders that left no room for ambiguity. Troops were to:
• use whatever force was required to protect life and property,
• clear any street, alley, or private ground necessary to stop violence,
• and give rioters only five minutes to disperse.
The city had become a military district, and its residents knew it.
A Gathering at Independence Hall
Even under martial law, civic life struggled to reassert itself.
On Thursday morning, thousands assembled in the yard at Independence Hall, drawn not by political fervor but by fear for the city’s future. This was not a Nativist crowd. These were lawyers, merchants, civic officers, and householders who had watched their city unravel.
Presiding over the meeting was Judge John M. Read, a Catholic lawyer known for moderation. Former congressman Frederick Fraley served as secretary. But it was Horace Binney, one of Philadelphia’s most respected attorneys, who delivered the words the city needed to hear. He reminded the assembly that they lived in a community “governed by laws,” and that the protection of those laws was essential “for his own safety and the peace and order of the city.”
To preserve that order, he argued, the authorities must exercise “whatever force is necessary.” Cheers filled the yard.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Ovid Johnson endorsed the sentiment. The government’s right to use lethal force in a riot, he declared, was not optional. It was fundamental. “Without its possession,” he said, “our government would be a mere shadow.”
It had taken the burning of two Catholic churches to provoke this recognition. But the city’s elite had finally reached a consensus: order must be restored at any cost.
Public Meetings Prohibited
By Patterson’s directive, all public meetings were suspended unless specifically approved by military authorities. Troops were stationed at every Catholic church.
Select and Common Councils voted emergency funds to cover the expense.
The city grew quiet. It was not peace. It was control.
A Test of the New Authority
That evening, a crowd gathered at St. Philip de Neri Church in Southwark. Young men jeered militia guards posted at the doors. A confrontation seemed inevitable. Then aldermen arrived, identified the instigators, and arrested them. And something extraordinary happened.
According to the Ledger, a “large body of citizens” intervened not to aid the rioters, but to support the constables. They physically prevented any rescue attempt.
By May 15, General Patterson dismissed the troops. Citizen patrols broke up soon after.
Martial law had lasted nearly a week. Its imprint would last much longer.
THE AFTERMATH: A HUMANITARIAN CRISIS UNFOLDS
The Refugees of Camac’s Woods
Even as the city imposed order, the human cost of the riots lingered painfully on the outskirts. Hundreds of Irish Catholic families, driven from Kensington on May 7 and May 8, were now clustered in Camac’s Woods, two or three miles to the north.
Their suffering was immediate and severe. Descriptions from the days that followed record scenes unprecedented in Philadelphia:
• Families huddled beneath trees, without tents or shelter.
• Mothers shielding infants from cold rain.
• Children crying beside piles of furniture salvaged from the flames.
• People surviving on berries.
• A woman giving birth under the open sky.
• Children “frightened into speech and the power of walking by the terrible scene.”
Some families moved toward Manayunk or Norristown. Others drifted from village to village, searching for relatives or charitable strangers.
Camac’s Woods was the closest thing Philadelphia had ever seen to a refugee camp.
Relief Takes Shape
In the absence of citywide institutions, relief efforts came through the actions of individuals. Judge George Stroud, Catholic lay leader Paul Reilly, and other civic volunteers gathered food, clothing, and temporary lodging. The migration continued for days. As one reporter wrote, Irish families were still “winding their way to the surrounding villages” long after the fires had burned out.
REBUILDING: A COMMUNITY RETURNS TO LIFE
Despite ruin, the Irish Catholic community refused to disappear.
St. Michael’s: A Chapel by Sheer Will
In the ashes of the church they had built with their own hands, parishioners of St. Michael’s resolved that they would not go even one Sunday without Mass.
Armed with little more than determination, men, women, and children worked “day and night” to clear debris and salvage usable lumber. Within a month, they erected a temporary chapel on the same ground where the mob had cheered the fall of the steeple.
A permanent church followed quickly. Its cornerstone was laid in August 1846, and it was dedicated in February 1847.
Houses and Markets Reborn
The physical rebuilding began almost immediately. By August 9, homes near Master and Cadwalader were under construction. The Nanny Goat Market, destroyed across two days of fires, was also rebuilt, though its activities later shifted to Girard Avenue.
Recovery did not erase the trauma. But it showed that the community’s roots were deeper than the ruins left behind.
THE FAILURES THAT LED TO REFORM
A System Collapses
In the months that followed, Philadelphia’s leadership confronted the uncomfortable truth that their civic structure had failed.
A contemporary report summarized it simply: “A mob in virtual possession of the city and county of Philadelphia. The law defied with impunity. Lives and property sacrificed in a desperate and terrible conflict, without parallel in the history of our State.”
Police forces had been ineffective. Volunteer fire companies refused to respond without military protection. Militia commanders hesitated under unclear liability laws. Philadelphia had been left defenseless.
A Path Toward Consolidation
These failures sparked a movement toward structural reform. Civic leaders argued that the city could no longer function as a patchwork of independent districts, townships, and boroughs. The riots became a major turning point leading to the 1854 Consolidation Act, which unified Philadelphia County and created a modern, professional police force. That transformation would change the city permanently.
Parochial Schools Take Root
The riots also accelerated change within the Catholic community. The public schools, still shaped by the Bible controversy, had proven hostile ground for Catholic children. In response, Bishop John Neumann, then coadjutor bishop, founded the city’s parochial school system. Its aim was simple: shield Catholic students from compulsory Protestant religious instruction. The network of Catholic education that would grow throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries began in the wake of 1844’s ashes.
Architecture Shaped by Fear
The memory of the riots etched itself onto Philadelphia’s skyline. When construction began on the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, its architect designed the lower walls without windows. Only the upper stories admitted light. The choice was deliberate. The cathedral would not be vulnerable to stones hurled by anti Catholic mobs. It stands today as a physical testament to the fear that the riots instilled in the Catholic community.
POLITICAL AFTERSHOCKS
The Rise of the Nativist Party
Ironically, the violence amplified the political power of the American Republican Party. Before the riots they counted only a few hundred supporters. Afterward they boasted tens of thousands.
In the November 1844 elections:
• They won three of Philadelphia’s four congressional seats.
• They sent nine legislators to Harrisburg.
• They took control of the city’s municipal offices.
• They won all six commissioner posts in Kensington.
Lewis Charles Levin, their most fiery orator, won a seat in Congress and would serve three terms.
That summer, a ten thousand person crowd watched the launch of a new frigate from Kensington’s shipyards. Its name was the Native American.
Trials and Uneven Justice
Between May 1844 and January 1845, more than forty riot trials came before Philadelphia’s courts. Roughly sixty five men were charged.
The results were striking:
• Nativists were acquitted at far higher rates.
• Irish Catholics received stricter sentences.
• Many Nativist arson charges were dropped outright.
Specific cases highlight the disparity:
• Isaac Hare, convicted of killing Irishman Joseph Rice, was pardoned because of “youth,” though he was twenty three.
• John Daley and John Paul received four year solitary confinement sentences for the deaths of Nativists Hammitt and Greble.
• Edmond Sherry, Terence Mullin, and Robert McQuillan (a child) were imprisoned for riot or stone throwing.
Legal outcomes reflected the prejudice that had fueled the violence itself.
A CITY FOREVER CHANGED
The Final Toll
Exact numbers will never be known.
But records document:
• at least eight Nativist deaths,
• at least five identifiable Irish Catholic deaths,
• likely fourteen to fifteen Irish fatalities in total,
• dozens wounded,
• property losses exceeding $250,000 (more than $6,000,000 adjusted for inflation).
Irish Catholics filed sixty to seventy lawsuits for damages under an 1841 statute.
Awards included:
• St. Michael’s Church: $27,000
• Sisters of Charity: $6,468.98
• Patrick Murray: $4,000
• Bernard Sherry: $3,000
None of the awards covered loss of life.
A Memory That Would Not Fade
In the years that followed, stories of the riots lived on in Kensington. These memories were carried into parish halls, kept alive in family stories, and passed down long after the last embers were gone. The Kensington Riots were not only a civic failure or a political flashpoint. They were an intimate human wound, etched into the collective memory of a community that rebuilt itself from ashes.