A City Poised for Conflict
In the early 1840s, Philadelphia was not a single city but a loose federation of independent districts, townships, and boroughs. These municipalities maintained their own police, courts, militias, and political structures. Kensington, located north of the city proper, was one of these districts. It was a densely built manufacturing hub heavily populated by Irish textile workers, many of them handloom weavers. The majority were Catholic. Many lived in modest frame dwellings near the Nanny Goat Market on what is now American Street.
Because the districts operated separately, law enforcement was fragmented. Multiple historians note that this political geography created the conditions for violence. The Irish community in Kensington lived near Nativist strongholds but had almost no institutional protection. The Third Ward of Kensington was a rare exception to the growing Nativist influence in 1844.
Nativist Agitation: Parties, Clubs, and a Weaponized Press
The American Republican Party (commonly called the Native Americans) and allied organizations such as the American Protestant Association framed their movement as patriotic reform. In practice, their platform revolved around restricting immigrant political power, opposing Catholic institutions, and promoting a sensational press that warned of “foreign influence.” Their newspapers accused Catholics of political corruption, clerical domination, and disloyalty to American values.
This messaging was paired with an aggressive expansion strategy. By May 1844, there was an American Republican Association in almost every ward of the city. The few that held out were the wards with the heaviest concentration of Irish residents. The Nativist leadership decided to force the issue. They announced their intention to form a ward association “in the heart of enemy territory, Third Ward, Kensington, the Irish weavers community,” and that “the results were not difficult to predict.”
Speakers frequently invoked a proposed 21-year residency requirement for naturalization, claiming it was necessary because, in the words of one Nativist orator, “a set of citizens, German and Irish, wanted to get the Constitution of the United States into their own hands and sell it to a foreign power.”
Modern historians have identified this rhetoric as deliberate provocation, not spontaneous popular resentment. Historian and author Zach Schrag summarized the underlying animus: “The soul and animus of the Native American party is hostility to the Catholic citizens, whether of native or foreign birth.”
Anti-Irish, Anti-Catholic Hostility
The hostility was directed most intensely at the Irish. While German Catholics often avoided the worst public attacks, Irish Catholics were characterized as politically dangerous, culturally inferior, and instruments of the Pope. Kensington’s St. Michael’s Church and its associated parish buildings were viewed by Nativists as symbols of a growing Irish Catholic presence.
Nativist propaganda commonly framed Catholicism as a direct threat to American institutions. The sources describe a widespread suspicion that Catholic immigrants were incapable of independent political judgment. In author Michael Feldberg’s summary, the fight to preserve Protestant institutions was “incidental to its fight to preserve American institutions from foreign subversion.”
The Bible in Public Schools Controversy: A Manufactured Flashpoint
The school issue had been simmering since 1842, when Bishop Francis Patrick Kenrick wrote to city officials requesting that Catholic children be excused from mandatory readings of the King James Bible and allowed to use the Douay translation or pursue secular lessons during Bible time. The school board permitted Catholic children to abstain from the readings but forbade the use of the Douay Bible in classrooms.
Nativist newspapers repeatedly accused Catholics of trying to “remove the Bible from public schools,” even though the Catholic request concerned only translation. This misrepresentation hardened into a core Nativist grievance.
The controversy intensified when Hugh Clark, an Irish alderman, was falsely accused of ordering the Bible removed from a Kensington school. Although the allegation was denied by both Clark and the school board, Nativist speakers used it as evidence of Catholic aggression. Contemporary Nativist pamphlets cited the episode as justification for rallies, and it became a central talking point in the weeks leading to the riots.
Across the available sources, the pattern is consistent. The “Bible question” did not cause the riots; it served as a pretext that amplified existing anti-immigrant hostility.