The term “Manifest Destiny” most readily evokes an image of rural North American landscapes traversed by white settlers, agents of the imperial drive to expand the boundaries, citizenry, and economies of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. In his new book, Andrew Heath shows how residents of Philadelphia defined this expansionist ethos in urban growth politics as well as national designs. Heath offers a detailed history of the campaign to expand the city limits of Philadelphia beyond the two square miles set out at its founding in 1682 and the aftermath of the 1854 Act of Consolidation, which ballooned the city limits to nearly 130 square miles. In doing so, he argues that a civic-minded drive for association, rather than individualism, drove urban development in Philadelphia and the broader political economy of urbanizing society in the mid-nineteenth century.

In Union There Is Strength depicts a city produced by nuanced debates about how to shape capitalism and its effects, not by a polar struggle between privatism and liberalism – a lasting model of urban development set out by Sam Bass Warner Jr. in his 1968 study of Philadelphia.Footnote ¹ In thematic chapters, Heath explains how a shared refrain for unity arose from distinct animating principles espoused by utopian socialists, political economists, and suburban expansionists who envisioned a more prosperous urban future built by consolidating interests. In his early chapters, Heath characterizes these alliances as antebellum calls for class solidarity across a metropolitan region of individual municipalities. Newspaper editor Morton McMichael, who sought to build an elite coalition, and labor activist George Lippard, who urged organization among workers, both called for a single municipal government to improve urban conditions and serve the economic interests of the region's residents. What emerged, Heath shows, was a conception of association as imperial expansion, which infused designs for urban growth, new connections to domestic and international markets, and local political reform. After the Civil War, Philadelphia boosters embedded their plans for city development in the national project of Reconstruction. Republican leaders envisioned a citizenry bound together through widespread property ownership in a city managed by a strong municipal government willing to take on debt to build public amenities. As real-estate speculators and railroad companies changed the face of the city, however, Philadelphia residents began to question who should bear the costs of urban expansion that lined the pockets of corporate developers. By the end of the 1870s, Heath argues, the optimism of consolidation evaporated as Philadelphia's propertied citizens increasingly turned to local government to police citizens and protect private property – or they left for the suburbs.

Heath draws on similar urban studies to draw brief connections between Philadelphia and other US cities, touching on violence in New York City streets, Chicago's taxation scheme, and Boston's municipal consolidation, as well as Brookline's suburban resistance to it. More often, Health frames his view of nineteenth-century urbanism through the eyes of his subjects. By Heath's characterization, this white, male “bourgeoisie” drove a dominant discourse of growth politics that espoused a civic-mindedness, which contrasted with both the city's self-interested “old elite” and neighborhood-bound political bosses (9). These urban reformers, Heath argues, were driven by farsighted visions of grand urban futures derived from cosmopolitan views of the world. Indeed, Heath frequently nods to the ways in which these Philadelphia men formed their plans for local reforms in conversation with political and architectural movements abroad, from the European revolutions of 1848, Italian unification, and the Paris Commune of 1871 to the construction of Haussmann's Parisian boulevards and Tsar Nicholas I's empire of railroads. By Heath's explanation, these reforming Philadelphians drew on the best aspects of modern European urbanism to make their own city “an imperial node” in new global economies (9). His portrayal of this pervasive engagement with international politics, planning, and development of market-oriented infrastructure also reminds readers that while Manifest Destiny may have touted American exceptionalism, it was one of many imperial attempts at nation building in the mid-nineteenth-century world.

Some of Heath's most intriguing urban reformers surface in discussions of the moral environmentalism that underpinned many designs for urban reform in Philadelphia. For instance, black abolitionist William Still used the language of domestic gentility to argue for racial integration of urban spaces. Robert Purvis adopted the language of urban civility as well – though Heath leaves unexplored the tantalizing statement that Purvis was the only black Philadelphian known to issue public support for Consolidation before 1861 (160). Women also make a rare appearance in discussion of attempts to “gentrify city politics” (146). Heath contrasts the consolidators’ domestic ideal of urban order with governance principles expressed by female suffragist and abolitionist Lucretia Mott as well as de facto neighborhood magistrate Kit McCluskey, a tavern keeper in a low-income neighborhood. Heath uses glimpses of these individuals to reflect on why his subjects excluded black men and white women from the political alliances and urban power structures that they built. A future study might build on Heath's excellent book to examine Still, Purvis, Mott, and McCluskey as urban visionaries in their own right. Their voices, in fuller conversation with the urban consolidators whom Heath has so skillfully analyzed, promise to expand our vision of urban futures in the mid-nineteenth century and the costs of urban imperialism.