The Prophet in the City of Desire: George Lippard’s Philadelphia Race Riot Novel and the Compromise of 1850

Abstract

George Lippard (1822–1854), an essential figure in Antebellum publishing culture but often overlooked in traditional literary history, gained prominence in American literary scholarship through David S. Reynold’s Beneath the American Renaissance (1988). This essay focuses on Lippard’s novella, The Killers: A Narrative of Real Life in Philadelphia (1850), which is currently undergoing reevaluation. The work is based on the California House riot, a race riot that took place in Philadelphia in October 1849. The Killers, whose subject is a highly localized event, has been considered a minor work in the urban crime fiction genre, a lesser version of his well-known masterpiece, The Quaker City (1845). However, it should not be overlooked that this work was written around the time of the Compromise of 1850, which was later described as symbolic of the national conflicts over slavery and territory that led to the Civil War. In addition, given the story’s climactic plot involving images of the illegal slave trade, the Cuban expedition frenzy, and the newly acquired land of California, it should be placed in a context that goes beyond urban racial and class conflicts.

In this paper, I first examine the writing process of The Killers and how it differs from other versions published at around the same time, taking into account the work’s evaluation in previous studies as an urban crime novel that deals with issues of race and class in the city. I then elucidate how the work’s perspective on urban crime and race riots is expanded to the geopolitical issues of the Antebellum United States, particularly the illegal slave trade and the Cuban expedition, to argue that the confusion over slavery and territorial expansion surrounding the Compromise of 1850 is depicted in this work. Finally, I discuss the ambiguity regarding the consequences of the main characters in The Killers——the free black man who meet a violent death alongside the villains and the white man and woman who leave for the new land of California. The ultimate goal of this paper is to demonstrate the significance of this work in the history of American literature. Reynolds argues that so-called canonical works of American literature, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), were created in response to the ideals of radical democracy expressed in the popular, or even vulgar, works by Lippard and other sensationalist writers, and points to the significance of their read-and-discard entertainment works that formed the undercurrent of the American Renaissance. In this paper, in line with Reynolds’s argument, I reevaluate The Killers as sharing the same problematic consciousness as those of the American Renaissance writers, who drew inspiration for their work from the contradictions and ambiguities of the Compromise of 1850.