American Nineteenth Century History

Vol. 13, No. 2, June 2012, 199
227

‘‘The producers on the one side, and the capitalists on the other’’:
Labor Reform, Slavery, and the Career of a Transatlantic Radical
Andrew Heath*

Department of History, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

Through exploring the neglected career of John Campbell, an Irish-born Chartist

refugee who ascended to a leadership role in the antebellum American labor
movement, this article seeks to shed light on how revolutionary upheaval in
Europe, debates over immigration, and sectional conflict affected working-class
politics. Focusing on the period 1848 to 1851, and tracing Campbell’s rapid
evolution from a radical opponent of slavery to an ardent supporter of black
subjugation, I argue that labor historians need to pay closer attention to shifting
local and national contexts to understand the racial politics of labor agitators. Yet
even as Campbell’s views changed, his commitment to a producerist vision
remained constant; by 1851 he had simply added people of African descent to a
list of ‘‘idle’’ nonproducers who lived off the labor of workingmen. His proslavery
twist on producer ideology suggests historians of antebellum social relations may
need to go beyond interrogating the racial dimensions of artisan republicanism to
gain a fuller understanding of the variety of working-class attitudes to race.
Keywords: John Campbell; Philadelphia; labor history; whiteness

As a wave of revolution swept over Europe in 1848, an Irish immigrant in

Philadelphia, the former handloom weaver and Chartist autodidact John H.
Campbell, published a Theory of Equality. Intended as a kind of Communist
Manifesto for the United States, it located America in a world-historical narrative
that exposed the subjugation of the producing classes, set out a vision of a
postcapitalist society based around ‘‘equal exchanges,’’ and denounced the enslave-
ment of black chattels and white wage earners. A scant three years later, Campbell
completed another book, again for the ostensible benefit of the nation’s workingmen.
His Negro-mania, however, all but abandoned the utopian socialism of his earlier
work, focusing instead on the racial capacity of men and women of African descent
and their place in American society. On both points Campbell took a chilling line.
Science, he argued, had determined that ‘‘the dark race must submit to the fair,’’ and
‘‘the two cannot exist together in the same community on terms of equality.’’ He
concluded by calling for the forced removal of his state’s free black population.1
Campbell’s volte face between 1848 and 1851 puzzled contemporaries who
frequently turned to the reformer’s ethnic origins to account for it. ‘‘A few months
since this author was an avowed and brawling Abolitionist, ready and willing to go to

*Email: a.d.heath@sheffield.ac.uk

ISSN 1466-4658 print/ISSN 1743-7903 online

# 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14664658.2012.708567
http://www.tandfonline.com
200 A. Heath

the South, sword in hand, to free the slave from bondage,’’ one of his critics declared
after the appearance of Negro-mania. He explained the transformation by pointing to
Campbell’s Irish roots, attributing his bilious outpouring to ‘‘avarice, hatred,’’ or ‘‘the
mania for notoriety,’’ ‘‘a disease’’ he concluded that was ‘‘not uncommon to his
countrymen.’’2 For many critics of slavery, indeed, Campbell was just one case of an
all-too-familiar type: a silver-tongued son of Erin who could wax lyrical about Irish
liberty while denying self-determination to the slave. As another of Campbell’s
adversaries in 1851, the black abolitionist Samuel Ringgold Ward, lamented a few
years later, ‘‘The bitterest, most heartless, most malignant, enemy of the Negro, is the
Irish immigrant.’’3
Over the past few decades, historians have grappled with Ward’s claim, trying to
understand how a cohort of Irish refugees who often joined the antislavery crusade at
home wound up among slavery’s most ardent defenders when transplanted to the
United States. Bryan P. McGovern’s recent study of the newspaper editor John
Mitchel, for example, attributes his support for the South’s ‘‘peculiar institution’’ to
his equation of Irish and Confederate nationalism. As McGovern is well aware,
however, the case of Mitchel
an ecumenical Protestant in an immigrant population
divided between Scotch
Irish Presbyterians and often Gaelic-speaking Catholics

illustrates the dangers of generalizing about a uniform Irish-American experience.
Campbell, for instance, shared Mitchel’s agrarian outlook, and welcomed him to
Philadelphia upon his arrival in the US in 1853, but his reasons for becoming (as one
of his acquaintances put it) a ‘‘fiery antagonist of the poor African’’ were quite
different.4
Born into a Catholic family, and having spent his childhood in an Ireland ravaged
by land monopoly, Campbell fiercely resented British imperialism and, like Mitchel,
saw the abolitionists of London’s Exeter Hall as agents of empire. The Anglophilia of
the Garrisonians grated on him, and as Marcus Cunliffe has argued, it was easy to
accuse such figures of turning a blind eye to the ‘‘wage slavery’’ of the old country’s
factory system while unpatriotically attacking their fellow whites in the South.5 But
dislike for genteel abolitionists did not necessarily translate into hatred for the slave,
and historians who have looked beyond Garrison have traced the contours of a much
more heterodox antislavery movement: one in which Irish immigrants and work-
ingmen could sometimes play a role. This was the world of reform Campbell moved
in prior to Negro-mania, and it enabled him to cast the peasants of his homeland and
southern slaves as common victims of a commercial system of which Britain was the
foremost
but by no means the only
champion.6 Moreover, his Irish identity was
far more complex than his critics in 1851 assumed. While he eventually followed the
well-trodden path of immigrants into the Democratic Party and Catholic Church, he
had been a critic of the Repeal movement that sought to dissolve the Act of Union, an
avowed atheist, and a man who swore to British Chartists that he would have joined
the Glorious Revolution of 1688, despite its tragic consequences for Irish Catholics.7
Nor was he part of the famine migration of the 1840s, as he spent several years in
England before setting sail for the US. Contrary to his critics’ claims, his ethnic
politics alone are not enough to make sense of his conversion to white supremacy.
 American Nineteenth Century History 201

An alternative, albeit complementary way to understand Campbell’s career is to

locate him in the racial milieu of the white worker. As a handloom weaver in
Manchester, Campbell spent formative years in the birthplace of industrial
capitalism, and though he was unable to continue in what was a declining trade
in the US, he continued to identify with what he saw as the producing classes.
Often using Irish migrants to the North as a case study, a generation of labor
historians writing after 1990 have tried understand why so many Civil War-era
radicals like Campbell joined the ranks of white supremacists. Scholars haunted by
the specter of union members lining up in their droves to vote for the likes of
George Wallace and Ronald Reagan reject both the idea that racism was imposed
from above by a hegemonic bourgeoisie and the celebratory narrative of journey-
men’s resistance to the rise of industrial capitalism. What emerges instead is a much
more tragic take on antebellum class formation: a story in which white workers
themselves forge the chains of racial oppression. In the best and most influential
study of its type, Wages of Whiteness, David Roediger argues that workers came to
see their white skin as a form of psychological compensation for their loss of
independence in the workplace. Capitalist transformation in a slaveholding
republic therefore made a race-conscious proletariat as ready to turn on defenseless
blacks as their employers.8
Few subfields of American history have had to withstand the barrage of criticism
directed at whiteness scholarship over the past two decades. Roediger and those who
wrote in his wake have variously been accused of psychoanalyzing the dictionary,
misinterpreting evidence, failing to conduct sufficient archival research, conceptual
confusion, and pouring old wine into new bottles.9 These charges do point to some
underlying problems with the genre, not least the absence of a weighty body of
empirical findings to test the tremendously rich
and deliberately provocative

outline sketched out in Wages of Whiteness. Skeptical historians, indeed, have called
with good reason for a greater attention to context, suggesting that the most useful
question to ask is not whether white workers in antebellum America were racist, but
why racial appeals acquired greater salience at particular moments.10
Given these concerns it seems a fitting moment to re-examine Campbell’s career.
Despite his supposed importance to working-class movements in Philadelphia
the
founder of American labor history John R. Commons argued he was the closest thing
the city’s artisans had to Horace Greeley
he receives only a passing mention in
whiteness literature, and here misunderstandings abound.11 Roediger, for example,
suggests both Theory of Equality and Negro-mania were pleas for ‘‘white unity in the
Democratic Party,’’ even though the former decried partisanship and lambasted
Jackson’s successors for failing to abolish slavery.12 Scholars writing before the
whiteness turn, however, tended to either miss the racial turn in Campbell’s politics
entirely or did not see it as a problem worth exploring.13 A fuller treatment of his life
therefore needs to explore the intersecting world of Irish nationalism, transatlantic
radicalism, labor agitation, and race: a world in which ideological principles and
tactical calculations were subject to the push and pull of national and international
forces as well as personal ambition. For Campbell, indeed
and for that matter the
broader community of labor radicals and reformers
the three years between 1848
202 A. Heath

and 1851 were especially tumultuous, as they grappled with the implications of
European revolutions, American slavery, and the ferocity of anti-immigrant
sentiment to their cause. Campbell’s about-face provides a window onto this crucial
period that shows how ideas about exploitation and racial difference were negotiated
and deployed. It can also shed light on the very different choices his allies in unions
and labor reform movements made when confronted with the same dilemma.14
There is another limitation of the whiteness literature, though, that has rarely
been explored, yet is particularly pertinent when reading Campbell’s career. Because
Roediger had the ‘‘New Labor History’’ of the 1970s and 1980s in his sights when he
wrote Wages of Whiteness, he dwelt on interrogating the racial dimensions of ‘‘artisan
republicanism,’’ a concept that in the hands of historians like Sean Wilentz
underscored the importance of independence to the worldview of nineteenth-century
journeymen.15 Campbell himself often spoke in a republican idiom, but like many
other workers in Britain and America, he was more interested in tangible questions
about the distribution of economic power than the abstract idea of independence.
From his entry into the Chartist movement to the publication of Negro-mania, he
remained preoccupied with the exploitation of the producing classes by idle
manufacturers, merchants, financiers, and agents of the state, and as he rose through
radical ranks in England and America, he played on his audience’s conviction that the
source of all value lay in labor. Campbell even pushed workingmen to reject the wage
relationship in its entirety, claiming the producer was entitled to the full product of
his toil. What changed as he sought to broaden his following among American
journeymen between 1848 and 1851, however, were the boundaries of the producers’
community. Crucially, he drew on a mixture of racial science, ethnology, and history
to popularize the idea that ‘‘idle’’ blacks belonged on the list of nonproducers, and
here his warning that emancipation would bring into being a vast new burden on
white labor reads like a portent of modern critiques of welfare. This article charts how
and why Campbell wove race into producer ideology
a language of tremendous
salience to midcentury workers but one that is easy to lose in discussions of artisanal
republicanism
and considers the consequences of his decision to do so.16
Campbell spent his formative years in England, where he rose to national
prominence in the Chartist movement. Born into a Catholic family in Ireland in
1809, he moved to Manchester
the ‘‘shock city’’ of the Industrial Revolution
in
search of work in his youth, and as a struggling handloom weaver he lodged with the
radical publisher Abel Heywood, who taught him the skills of the book trade and
introduced him to working-class politics. In 1832, the Great Reform Act had
extended the vote to middle-class men, but denied the franchise to craftsmen and
laborers. By the end of the decade, workers left beyond the bounds of the political
community were campaigning for the six points of the National Charter, a document
that promised equal suffrage, the secret ballot, and annual parliaments. Campbell
gravitated to the mass movement and, after earning his spurs in Manchester’s
industrial suburb of Salford, won election to the first National Executive in 1840.
Over the following two years he served as a secretary and itinerant lecturer for the
Chartists and won the confidence of their figurehead, Feargus O’Connor.17
 American Nineteenth Century History 203

It is in the Chartist movement that we see the first expression of the producer
ideology that would shape Campbell’s career as a labor reformer and white
supremacist in the US. Where historians once saw Chartism as the flowering of
working-class consciousness, work in the last three decades has stressed its political
rather than economic orientation.18 Campbell, however, would not have recognized
the distinction. In keeping with the Charter’s constitutional objectives, he argued
reform of the suffrage laws would naturally ameliorate social ills, but he strove to
build bridges between the movement and nascent trade unions and urged workers to
organize to protect themselves in the workplace.19 Moreover, he frequently expressed
his disgust with what he saw as middle-class reform movements like the Anti-Corn
Law League and Daniel O’Connell’s Irish Repealers, who at one point were accused of
plotting to assassinate him.20 His verbal salvoes were sometimes directed here at
Britain’s abolitionists, who he accused of caring for the interests of black slaves while
ignoring the fate of the white factory operative, yet beyond a barbed aside at Jewish
financiers little in his English career hints at the racial turn he would take just a
decade later.21 Already present though was a preoccupation with the idea that the
‘‘plundered producer’’ sustained a class of idle capitalists, lawyers, and politicians.22
This transatlantic ‘‘language of labor’’ would find him a ready audience when he
emigrated to America in early 1843.
While Campbell often lauded the United States as a beacon of equal rights, he had
little choice in his decision to emigrate. In 1842, as he arrived in Manchester for a
meeting of the Chartist National Executive, a general strike broke out. His response to
the eerie stillness as the mills ground to a halt
‘‘something must come out of this,
and something big too’’
has often appeared in accounts of the period, but in
actuality the Chartist leadership dithered over how to respond to the so-called ‘‘Plug
Plot.’’ Despite neither instigating nor sustaining the strike, most of the National
Executive were arrested and put on trial; Campbell, despite being released on a
technicality, faced a miserable future. Accusations in the major Chartist newspaper
against his expenses claims forced his resignation as secretary, while as a free man he
would certainly have been carefully watched by government spies, who he already
suspected were reading his mail. Emigration
perhaps with the assistance of a state
grateful to rid itself of troublemakers
must have seemed the only available option.
His subsequent claim that he had left the UK to escape ‘‘the bloodhounds of the
Government’’ was only a minor exaggeration.23
Any illusions Campbell retained that a broader suffrage would ameliorate
inequality must have been crushed when he arrived in Philadelphia to find a city
depressingly similar to Manchester. Growing faster than at any other period in its
history, Philadelphia was shifting from a commercial center to America’s preeminent
manufacturing metropolis, and the impact of this transformation on the city’s
manual workers produced a militant response. Journeymen and day laborers had
come together a few years before Campbell left England in the General Trades’ Union
and in a stunning series of strikes secured higher wages and the ten-hour day. The
hard times that followed the Panic of 1837 weakened workers’ bargaining power,
however, and many radicals drifted into party politics or reform movements like
temperance. Meanwhile, mass migration from Europe
40,000 arrived in the city
204 A. Heath

from England and Scotland alone in the 1840s, with many more newcomers who
hailed from Ireland and Germany
poured into the labor market and strained
relations between Protestants and Catholics.24 Campbell himself found it difficult to
find work at more than ‘‘starvation wages’’ as a handloom weaver in Philadelphia.25
Masters in the trade, mostly based in the northern suburb of Kensington and reliant
on the domestic outwork of Irish-born men and women, were struggling to compete
with mills equipped with the power loom, and their attempts to scale back piece rates
were met with violence in the early 1840s.26 Campbell probably witnessed the bloody
nativist riots in May and July of 1844, but facing penury, he left for Charleston in
search of a livelihood soon afterwards, leaving his family in Philadelphia. He would
never return to the handloom, following instead the bookselling trade he had learnt
from Heywood in Manchester, before branching out into publishing.
How his experiences in South Carolina shaped his later career remains a mystery.
It would be tempting to suggest that he imbibed proslavery doctrine during his
sojourn in the South, and he did later quote one of the Palmetto State’s most ardent
defenders of the ‘‘peculiar institution,’’ James Henry Hammond, in Negro-mania. But
given Campbell was professing abolitionist sympathies years after his return, and
would condemn slaveholders and chattel slavery in later work, this seems unlikely.
Indeed, the strongest hint prior to 1851 of his racial
as opposed to anti-abolitionist

outlook came before he had left for the South. In December 1844 he wrote to an
anti-slavery meeting in Philadelphia, inquiring ‘‘what the objects and plan of the
Convention were,’’ and if ‘‘they proposed to do anything in behalf of the white slaves
of the North.’’ Campbell may have been putting out feelers to reform groups here, or,
more likely given his attitude to British abolitionists, the question was a deliberately
pointed one designed to expose the hypocrisy of middle-class reformers. His follow-
up, though, asked whether the association was made up of ‘‘amalgamationists,’’ a
term that at the very least suggests Campbell was already fluent in the racial
vernacular of the antebellum city.27
If race mattered to Campbell, however, it was not a priority, and if anything the
friendships he forged with radicals over the following years drew him closer to an
anti-slavery position. Within months of arriving in America, he was writing letters to
the Boston Investigator, an ‘‘infidel’’ paper that advocated Fourierist association, and
after returning to Philadelphia sometime after the summer of 1845 he found in
lyceums and reading rooms men and women committed to the cause of labor reform.
The emigration of Chartists in the 1840s, Bruce Laurie argues, significantly boosted a
strain of ‘‘rationalist radicalism’’ that had flourished during the previous decade, and
over the following years, Campbell forged an alliance with other emigrants from the
British Isles such as his devoted follower and sometime business-partner, Edward W.
Power. Alongside native-born reformers, they founded an atheists’ association, a
Chartist League, a Social Reform Society, a Social Improvement Society (SIS), and
later land-reform and eight-hour clubs.28
Politically Campbell and his fellow travelers gravitated towards the Democrats,
though this seems to have had more to do with the party’s agrarian, anti-corporate,
and Anglophobic rhetoric than its alliance with southern slaveholders, which Texas
annexation and the Mexican War had exposed in the mid-1840s. Campbell was
 American Nineteenth Century History 205

certainly active in the party by 1847, but he retained a fierce independent streak, and
the reformers drew more inspiration from a pantheon of revolutionary leaders than
the heavyweights of the Second Party System.29 Their patron saint was another
transatlantic refugee and sometime Philadelphian Tom Paine, who Campbell extolled
as ‘‘one of the noblest pioneers . . . of the progression of the human family.’’ He and
Power also remembered the French Revolutionaries Robespierre and St. Just
who
would have had Paine’s head had they not gone to the guillotine themselves in 1794

as martyrs to the producers’ cause.30
For reformers eager to garb themselves in the cloak of the Jacobins, the European
Revolutions of 1848 appeared as a welcome portent. Americans across partisan and
sectional divisions initially celebrated the spread of liberty to the Old World, but
almost as soon as word reached the US of the proclamation of the French Second
Republic, radicals asked how the upheavals on the other side of the Atlantic might
inspire the reconstruction of their own society.31 In Philadelphia, whatever fragile
consensus there was on the meaning of the revolutions fractured almost immediately
when one of the biggest demonstrations ever to take place on Independence Square
gathered in late April to celebrate European liberty. On two sides of the square,
speakers addressed the crowd in French and German, while on the main platform,
fronting onto the state house in which the Continental Congress had gathered seven
decades before, prominent citizens from both major parties lauded the ‘‘marvelous
events’’ that had remade a continent shrouded in despotism. Several orators looked
forward to the revolutionary tide sweeping over Ireland, while what was described as
a ‘‘spontaneous’’ gathering of ‘‘colored people’’ near the main meeting commended
the decision of the new French Government to abolish slavery in its colonies. ‘‘A few
years since the disorderly and riotous would not have tolerated such a thing in this
city,’’ the Public Ledger observed, but ‘‘to the credit of the occasion be it spoken, there
was no disposition to interrupt or interfere, by the white persons present . . . .’’
When a police officer tried to disperse the black citizens, indeed, whites intervened to
keep the meeting going. ‘‘All present seemed actuated with the idea that the largest
liberty was the order of the day.’’32
The readiness of Philadelphia’s free black community to link European affairs to
their own struggle for freedom and citizenship in the United States indicates the
emancipatory promise of the revolutionary events, and reformers, Campbell among
them, also interpreted the upheaval in a radical vein. At the Independence Square
meeting, the Austrian immigrant Francis J. Grand had argued that ‘‘the Bourgeoisie’’
had risen on the ‘‘ruin’’ of the nobility after 1789, and the ‘‘struggle between labor
and capital’’ had commenced thereafter, leading to 1848. ‘‘It was not only royalty the
people had to put down,’’ Grand insisted, ‘‘but monopoly.’’33 Grand’s message echoed
the utopian sentiments of the city’s socialists, and along with resolutions offered by
the Liberty Party activist and labor reformer William Elder that referred directly
to the abolition of slavery and the fraternity of man, evidently unnerved the city’s
political and social elite. The appositely named Committee of 76, which had been
charged with forwarding the meeting’s sentiments to the French Provisional
Government, left the more radical resolutions out of its message, leading the likes
of Campbell, Elder, and the abolitionist Passmore Williamson to gather again a few
206 A. Heath

weeks later to protest ‘‘the mutilation of the proceedings.’’ The second meeting
declared that ‘‘the proclamation of Liberty
Equality
Fraternity, realized by the
abolition of Slavery, by the universality of suffrage, and the earnestly endeavored
organization of industry, reveals the sentiment of our own Revolution in all its deep
significance.’’34
Campbell saw the coming of the Second Republic as an opportunity to unite
American workers behind his producerist vision. He had been working on his Theory
of Equality for some time before news reached America of the overthrow of Louis
Phillippe, for the book came out in April, just a few weeks after the King’s abdication
and the same month as the first of the Independence Square meetings. Nevertheless
he dedicated it to the members of the ‘‘Provisional Government’’ in Paris who (he
assured them in a pompous dedication) ‘‘will be remembered when the names of
emperors, kings, and despots are forgotten.’’35 Like a far more enduring revolutionary
pamphlet from 1848, The Communist Manifesto, Theory situated events in Europe in
a world-historical narrative that roamed widely over space and time. ‘‘I cast my
mind’s eye over the earth, and what do I behold?’’ Campbell asked in a typical
passage. ‘‘I am carried to London, to Manchester, to Birmingham, to Glasgow, to
Lyons, to Venice, to New York, and I witness the palace and the hovel, the aristocrat
‘clothed in purple and fine linen every day,’ and the beggar in tatters.’’ The Spanish
conquest of America, Venetian merchant capitalism, and
tellingly, given the racial
turn his career would soon take
the African slave trade all came under attack.36
But Campbell’s real audience was in the Anglophone world, and although the
foundations of his system lay in radical European philosophy, his reformist agenda
was addressed to American
and to a lesser extent British
concerns about the
exploitation of labor. At the heart of Theory lay the Rousseauian doctrine that the
root of inequality lay in private ownership of the soil. From this, Campbell argued,
sprang monopolies of money, education, and social and political power, which
enabled the commercial classes to deny producers the full value of their labor by
forcing workers into overcrowded housing, manipulating their currency, and keeping
them in a state of ignorance.37 The upshot of such a system was a society in which the
efforts of one portion of the population maintained the luxuried lifestyle of the
indolent. This idea
which would recur in a twisted form in Negro-mania
led to a
starkly bifurcated society of the productive and the idle. ‘‘The two classes which
constitute the citizens of the Republic,’’ Campbell argued, ‘‘are the producers on the
one side, and the capitalists on the other; all other classes, and grades of classes,
resolve themselves into these two.’’38
Campbell prescribed for these ills a nationwide system of government-run
workshops
not unlike the producer cooperatives established in France
to ensure
‘‘equal exchanges.’’ In these, workers would deposit the fruits of their labor, in return
for which they would receive notes proportional to the hours of toil that had gone
into making the goods; currency would therefore remain tied to the actual value of
the nation’s produce rather than being subject to the wild fluctuations that had
caused the Panics of 1819 and 1837.39 Though utopian in its recommendations,
Theory addressed anxieties over wages, banks, and monopoly that were widely shared
among Americans and did so in a polemical tone that implied the transition to the
 American Nineteenth Century History 207

form of socialism it advocated would be anything but peaceful. Little in Campbell’s

book was original
lengthy extracts were lifted from the study of another
transatlantic radical, John Francis Bray, and Commons called his ideas a kind of
‘‘compendium of all the schemes of his period,’’ many of which had gestated in
Philadelphia’s radical subculture over the preceding two decades
yet its willingness
to take the labor theory of value, the bedrock of producer ideology, to its extremity
makes it an instructive insight into radical thought.40
What it certainly was not, though, was a plea for ‘‘white unity inside the
Democratic Party.’’41 Theory did attack the Whigs as advocates of ‘‘aristocracy,’’ praise
Jefferson for recognizing ‘‘the great truths of the equality of mankind,’’ and laud
Jackson (alongside the Native American chieftain Black Hawk) for seeing the earth
‘‘as the common property of man.’’ But Campbell bemoaned the Democracy’s
betrayal of its principles in accepting paper money, refusing to back land reform, and
failing to make good on its free trade rhetoric. He also complained that it had not
abolished slavery, a charge he repeated in respect to the District of Columbia as late as
December 1850.42 This was hardly the stuff of a party propagandist.
Nor was there much in Theory to suggest the racial line Campbell’s career would
soon take. As Campbell’s letter to the anti-slavery convention in 1844 suggests, race
was already present in his thinking, but there is little evidence of it in the 1848 work,
which, when it touched on the question of slavery, struck mildly abolitionist notes.43
Campbell’s critique of slavery drew partly on free labor doctrine in noting that wages
were lower in plantation districts where masters monopolized the best land, but there
are glimmers of his humanitarian sensibilities, too. He wrote sympathetically of the
‘‘swart’’ Africans who suffered with the Irish and Chinese as victims of British
‘‘imperial justice’’ and quoted his Chartist patron James Bronterre O’Brien’s attack on
the ‘‘commercial men’’ who had torn blacks ‘‘from friends and home’’ and sold them
into ‘‘bitter bondage.’’ Only a passing reference to the ‘‘pseudo philanthropy’’ of
abolitionists who forgot ‘‘the white slave’’
an echo of Campbell’s earlier attacks on
their British counterparts during his Chartist days and a theme he would expound on
in Negro-mania
struck a discordant note.44 In actuality, though, the language of
slavery appeared more often in Theory to describe wage labor
when he counted five
million producers in America he ignored southern chattel
than it did as the bonded
labor system of the plantation South. But if the text was inconsistent on whether
Americans of African descent were victims of an international system that
discriminated against all producers, white and black, or markers of the degradation
to which white workers were being reduced, race was not the driving force of history;
indeed, when he used the term at all it was usually prefaced by ‘‘human.’’45 There is
no indication that Campbell believed blacks were oppressed on account of their
physiological or mental incapacity to resist the Caucasian, as monopoly
not biology

produced inequality.
In all likelihood Campbell did not discuss chattel slavery at any length in Theory
because he saw the peculiar institution as just one manifestation of inequality, and by
no means the most important one to his potential followers in the North. Campbell
aimed to secure the kind of leadership role in a resurgent labor movement of wage
workers he had enjoyed in England, and for all the universalistic implications of his
208 A. Heath

rhetoric, this meant focusing on the grievances of the producing classes and ignoring
the particular claims of one group, whether slaves or Irish immigrants. Though
historians of Chartism have largely ignored him, he won election to the movement’s
Executive Committee in 1841, and his publishing and itinerant lecturing gave him a
prominence in the organization that extended well beyond Manchester. After 1848,
Campbell followed a similar script to cultivate an American following. He sent copies
of Theory to journals like the New York Herald (which curtly dismissed it as Paineite
‘‘humbug’’), wrote a series of letters under his own name to Horace Greeley’s social
democratic Tribune, and offered to visit Manhattan, where he had secured a second
publisher for his manifesto, to deliver a course of lectures. Unlike Marx, he was never
an employee of the Tribune, but he often toyed with the idea of starting a similar
reform journal in Philadelphia, albeit along radical Democratic rather than Whig
lines.46
The years either side of midcentury were an auspicious moment for such schemes
in his adopted city. With the recovery from the long depression that had followed the
Panic of 1837 under way by the late 1840s and the ranks of radicals swelled by British
and German migrants, artisans in the trades stepped up their organizing efforts.
Campbell may have been spurred into writing Theory by the calling of a trades’
convention in Philadelphia that endorsed cooperation in late 1847, and by early 1851,
craftsmen had established the Assembly of Associated Mechanics and Workingmen, a
citywide confederation of unions modeled on the General Trades’ Union of the
1830s.47 Over the course of those four years of labor militancy, he regularly ventured
beyond the lyceums and reading rooms of the city’s ‘‘rationalist radicals’’ to
popularize his vision among the city’s journeymen and laborers. Just a few weeks
before the publication of Negro-mania, for example, Campbell addressed a July 4
demonstration on Independence Square, where in his ‘‘brusque and fearless’’ manner
he read out labor’s ‘‘Declaration of Rights,’’ a document he had probably penned
himself that asserted society’s obligation to ‘‘provide for the subsistence of all its
members’’ and declared the ‘‘earth, the air, the light,’’ and ‘‘the water’’ belong ‘‘alike to
all the children of men.’’48 His regular presence on the rostrum at such events, which
often drew large crowds, explains why Commons saw Campbell’s role in Philadelphia
as analogous to Greeley’s in New York, and he himself claimed
in a begging letter of
1849 to the future president James Buchanan
that his ‘‘influence with the working
class is great.’’49 Such a boast was not entirely baseless. Philadelphia’s leading penny
paper, the Public Ledger, was concerned enough by the rage for Campbell’s ‘‘equal
exchanges’’ that it devoted a leader column a few days after the July 4 meeting to
explaining the law of supply and demand, while the Tribune deemed him a figure of
enough importance to refute his claim the producer was entitled to the full value of
his labor.50 Campbell’s book might have had little impact on its own, then, but
through hard graft and relentless self-promotion he was able to disseminate his ideas
well beyond its limited readership. Like Marx and Engels’s Manifesto, and Negro-
mania too, Theory should be read as a tactical intervention as well as a philosophical
statement.
Campbell’s endeavors in Philadelphia soon propelled him into the nationwide
land reform movement. By the second half of the 1840s George Henry Evans’s
 American Nineteenth Century History 209

National Reform Association (NRA), an organization calling for the eradication of

land monopoly and the distribution of the vast public domain to actual settlers had
acquired a significant following among working- and middle-class reformers. As
Jamie L. Bronstein has demonstrated in an excellent comparative study, it pursued
strikingly similar goals to the Chartist Land Company, an organization established by
Campbell’s friend Feargus O’Connor soon after the Plug Plot. Radicals from
landlord-dominated Ireland were unsurprisingly at the forefront of such movements,
and another Chartist emigrant to the US, Donegal-born Thomas Devyr, led the Anti-
Rent Party in upstate New York before becoming one of the founder members of the
NRA.51
The agrarian strand that ran through Campbell’s career prior to Negro-mania
drew the reformer to the NRA. He had contrasted the independent life of the yeoman
farmer to the dependence of the workingman in great cities well before he crossed the
Atlantic, and in one of his earliest speeches in Manchester he declared ‘‘the land
ought to be common property.’’ By 1847, he was introducing resolutions to a Chartist
sympathy meeting in Philadelphia which claimed, ‘‘the soil of the country should be
made to sustain all the citizens.’’52 Both Theory and his letters to the Tribune
a
paper that by the late 1840s had lined up behind Evans’s movement
developed this
argument, the former citing the English critic of industrial society Thomas Carlyle (a
favorite of John Mitchel’s, too) in attacking private property.53 In 1851, Campbell
approvingly reported a set of resolutions proposed by his allies at a workingmen’s
rally, which insisted a federal homestead law would ‘‘enable us to escape the baleful
system of European Landlordism.’’54 Ireland here might have been the warning from
the Old World Campbell had in mind, but he saw land monopoly as a global malady,
afflicting everywhere from British India and Tsarist Russia, to the American South
and West.
Land reform in Philadelphia attracted a far more widespread following than has
sometimes been suggested.55 Along with Campbell’s Social Improvement Society
(SIS), the local branch of the NRA, the Union of Associationists, the German Union
of Working Men, the Ten Hour Association, the Land Reform Association, the Real
Estate Association, and the Assembly of Associated Mechanics and Workingmen
more or less supported Evans’s movement, as did several craft unions and
politicians.56 The radical novelist and social reformer George Lippard, meanwhile,
established a secret association in the city, the Brotherhood of Union, which
proclaimed that ‘‘Every Man hath a Right to Life, Liberty, Land and Home,’’ and
quickly spread across the country.57 Like the Chartists, and for that matter the
abolitionists, land reformers were part of a mass movement that tied local activism to
national organization, but in contrast to the utopian concluding chapters to Theory,
their ends seemed eminently attainable given the vastness of the public domain. The
NRA then provided a perfect vehicle for Campbell to demonstrate the relevance of his
principles to practical political questions, and in 1848, he attended its National
Industrial Congress (NIC) for the first time.
As Campbell blended the utopianism of Theory with the more practical task of
movement-building, he was forced to confront two intersecting issues that threatened
to divide labor reformers: nativism and slavery. The former would eventually tear
210 A. Heath

apart the city’s trades’ assembly, the latter, fatally rupture the NRA, but these
outcomes did not seem foreordained in the late 1840s. Certainly the influx of
unskilled Catholic laborers to Philadelphia in the midst of an economic depression
and Protestant revival had hindered the cause of organized labor. But as Bruce Laurie
has shown, while the radicals of the 1830s turned inwards to party politics or
evangelical reform, working-class nativists by the end of the 1840s were often playing
a part in the resurgent trades’ movement. These ‘‘revivalist radicals,’’ as he terms
them, remained hostile to immigration and rum, and were more likely to blame their
lot on bankers than their employers, whom they identified with as fellow producers.58
Campbell shared some of their concerns, arguing the influx of European laborers
tended to depress wages, and calling for restrictions on the sale of ‘‘grog,’’ but he
found the chauvinism of the American Republican Party and its fraternal sidekick the
Order of American Mechanics (OAM) both tactically naı̈ve and morally reprehen-
sible. Could native-born workers, he asked, seriously order ‘‘the poor wanderer, the
oppressed outcast, and the flying refugee from the despotism of Europe’’ to return to
their ‘‘stripes and chains’’?59
Campbell was no doubt speaking here as a political exile himself, but though it
might be easy to see the racial turn his career would soon take as part of a story about
how the Irish became white, his relationship to his country of birth was far more
complicated. Though he supported Irish nationalism from at least the 1840s onwards,
he saw his homeland as just one victim of a British imperialism that was in itself
merely the latest incarnation of tyrannical commercial might. He had opposed the
repeal of the Act of Union binding Ireland to Great Britain on the professed grounds
that the people of the two nations should ‘‘go together’’ as ‘‘producers of wealth,’’ and
after the Civil War he penned an influential letter to a number of American
newspapers warning immigrants away from offering financial support to the
Fenians.60 Ironically, his atheism may have made him more acceptable to evangelical
artisans than the Catholicism of other Irish immigrants, and he shared with nativist
craftsmen a devout belief in the labor theory of value. As an ever-greater number of
revivalists embraced craft unionism at midcentury, radicals of his persuasion
often
immigrants with similarly ‘‘infidel’’ leanings
found themselves on the same side in a
series of disputes. By early 1851, several of Campbell’s supporters (though notably
not Campbell himself) took their seats alongside members of the OAM in the trades’
assembly.61 Their alliance however remained fragile, and that summer, the cracks
began to widen.
If labor agitation in Philadelphia forced Campbell to articulate his stance on
immigration, the land reform movement pushed him to confront the question of
black slavery. The NRA’s vision of the West as a refuge for white northern producers
clashed with the expansionist ambitions of southern planters, and in the debates over
the territorial question during the Mexican War, reformers tended to support the
Pennsylvania Democrat David Wilmot’s proposal to exclude slaveholding landlords
from any new acquisitions. Many of the organization’s members, moreover, were
antislavery by conviction, and though they disagreed with abolitionists over priorities
and tactics, they shared a genuine concern for the rights of black labor as well as
white.62 In 1848, when Campbell completed Theory, traces of this free soil outlook
 American Nineteenth Century History 211

could be discerned in his broader critique of exploitation, and over the following
three years, his engagement with the biracial SIS, Tribune, and NRA brought him into
close contact with ardent opponents of slavery. To call him (as a critic later alleged) a
‘‘brawling abolitionist’’ in this period might have been a stretch, but prior to the
spring of 1851, he appears to have followed land reformers in seeing antislavery
politics as part of a broader project to emancipate the producing classes from the
thrall of land monopolists: a design many of his fellow Democrats in Philadelphia
endorsed along with erstwhile Liberty Party supporters like William Elder, Campbell’s
ally in 1848. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act
the most prosouthern plank of
the ‘‘Armistice of 1850’’
heightened the feeling in radical circles that the fate of
white and black liberty was inseparable. Though opposition to the measure in the city
initially proved muted, the legislation, by compelling every northerner to aid in the
return of runaways, turned what had hitherto been an abstract and remote issue into
a matter citizens in the free states could not avoid. Even before the events of 11
September 1851, when African Americans ambushed a slave-catcher in nearby
Christiana and were hauled before the courts on treason charges, fugitive cases had
already been heard in Philadelphia. As a precarious truce brought the sectional crisis
to a temporary halt, it became impossible for labor reformers like Campbell to
sideline slavery.
By midcentury, then, Campbell inhabited a world very different to the one that
had existed just two years before when he had published Theory. If the memory of the
1848 revolutions still inspired radicals, they were well aware that their answers to
the labor question could no longer ignore nativism and sectional conflict. The
penetration of these issues into the circle of a resurgent radicalism is evident in the
proceedings of Campbell’s SIS. In 1850, the association, which drew a mixture of
manual workers and middle-class reformers to its meetings each Sunday at the
capacious Franklin Hall, continued to fight for the rights of producers, with lectures
on the likes of ‘‘Money, Credit and Banking,’’ ‘‘Landlordism and Usury,’’ and the
‘‘Dignity and Philosophy of Labor.’’63 But speakers addressed with growing frequency
the issues that threatened to divide their movement, too. At one meeting in
November 1850 the society asked whether ‘‘the Influx of Immigrants’’ was ‘‘a Benefit
to the Nation?’’, and the subject came up again three times the following month.
Slavery was another recurring topic. With the Fugitive Slave Law (as the SIS put it)
‘‘now attracting such general attention,’’ reformers set aside two consecutive sessions
to debate whether abolitionists were ‘‘right to resist it.’’64 A few months later, the
organization discussed over the course of eight weeks whether ‘‘the Colored races of
men’’ could ‘‘be made mentally, politically and socially equal with the white.’’ Close to
a thousand people supposedly attended one of the debates.65 Campbell, who
supported the cause of woman’s suffrage to his death, jostled with the likes of the
Quaker reformer Lucretia Mott at the meetings; African American abolitionists such
as the Rev. Samuel Ringwold Ward also spoke.
Campbell emerged from the storm of sectional politics and labor agitation over
the winter of 1850
1851 an avowed white supremacist, staking his claim to leadership
of Philadelphia’s workingmen on an appeal to racial solidarity. The SIS debates
appear to have been his first major public foray into racial questions, and in March
212 A. Heath

1851, the evening after a free black resident of the city lectured on how ‘‘the Ethiopian
or Negro race’’ had ‘‘founded the arts and sciences of the world,’’ he spoke in the same
venue on the ‘‘Mental, Moral and Physical Inferiority of the Negro Race.’’66 Here, the
issue might have been forgotten
reform was a broad church, after all, and the
position Campbell had adopted had plenty of learned adherents
but he rarely had
an idea that he did not seek to convert into political capital, and when two
opportunities to do so presented themselves later that summer he was quick to seize
them.
The first was the visit to America of the British abolitionist George Thompson.
Thompson had come to the US on a speaking tour in 1834 and after finding himself
harassed by a mob in Boston, he had been forced to flee to Canada. While Cunliffe
points out his 1850 visit was ‘‘somewhat less stormy,’’ the antislavery champion was
nevertheless hung in effigy in Springfield, Massachusetts, while a New England
illustrator published a cartoon that contrasted the benighted condition of wage slaves
in Britain with the supposedly contented black slaves of the South (Figure 1).67
Campbell followed a similar line of attack, and with his allies among the city’s
workingmen, held a protest meeting at which a ‘‘victim’’ of ‘‘Thompson’s friends, the
English Cotton Lords,’’ exposed ‘‘the cant and hypocrisy of sham philanthropists,
who come over to play the negro, while they are blind to white men’s slavery in the
British Isles.’’ He later interrupted a gathering organized by Mott and other
abolitionists as Elder was about to speak. His behavior at these events was in
keeping with his oft-stated contempt for British antislavery activists, and he accused
Thompson of trying to break up the Union, ‘‘the last hope of the oppressed of all
lands.’’ But he went much further than before in declaring that if ‘‘American slaves
were to resist their oppressors, he would join the oppressors, and help to shoot them
down.’’ Campbell’s longstanding dislike for abolitionists, which remained rooted in
their lack of sympathy for the cause of white labor and their ties to a British
establishment that had persecuted him as an Irishman and Chartist, now extended
with murderous intent to the object of their benevolence.68
The second episode involved a fellow member of the SIS, the African American
John C. Bowers. In June 1851, Elder’s Real Estate Association of Philadelphia sent
Bowers to the NIC in Albany, the annual gathering of the NRA. Campbell was not a
delegate this time, but his friends Power and Eugene Ahern were. Along with several
of their peers they objected to Bowers taking his place. The matter was referred to a
committee, where a majority supported admitting him; in response, Campbell’s allies
from Pennsylvania and New York walked out. Campbell, who must have known in
advance that Bowers would be making the trip to Albany, sent a letter to Evans that
though never recorded in the proceedings circulated widely (almost certainly thanks
to his own efforts) afterwards.69 In protesting against the admission of ‘‘all those with
the taint of inferior blood’’ to the body, Campbell explained his reasoning, which
amounted to a mixture of the current scientific theory he had drawn on in the SIS
debates and political calculation. The ‘‘negro is inferior to the white,’’ he declared,
and ‘‘any association between the inferior and superior races, while it may elevate the
lower race, must certainly deteriorate the higher.’’ Admitting Bowers to the NIC
would enflame ‘‘fanatics of the abolition school, which treasonably avow their
 American Nineteenth Century History 213

Figure 1. ‘‘Slavery as it Exists in America/Slavery as it Exists in England.’’

Source: John Haven.70
214 A. Heath

intention of rending asunder the Republic,’’ and array ‘‘ninety-nine hundredths of the
whites against the cause of land reform.’’ He counseled against introducing a
distractive and divisive issue at a moment when ‘‘land and labor reform are assuming
a position of such magnitude.’’ ‘‘United labor and individual fruition appear to be the
great ideas now extending among the producers,’’ he concluded, and he proposed to
‘‘facilitate that movement’’ by starting (as he had been promising to do for over a
year) a weekly paper ‘‘devoted to these purposes.’’71 The rump of the NRA ignored
him and four years later elected a black officer. While it dissolved without ever
attaining its goal of land limitation and free farms, its members found a new home in
the Republican Party, where their activism strengthened the antislavery fiber of the
organization and helped to make the Homestead Act of 1862.72 Campbell’s curious
design for a journal of utopian socialism and racial science meanwhile never
appeared; instead, the racial ideas in his letter were expanded into Negro-mania,
which was published sometime in the early fall of 1851.
It is unlikely Campbell began work on Negro-mania before the furor over
Thompson’s visit and the battle over Bowers’s admission to the NIC brought him a
modicum of national attention. The book shows all the signs of hasty composition,
and critics were quick to point out the abundant inconsistencies and grammatical
slips.73 In a work of some 500-odd pages, meanwhile, Campbell’s voice is rarely heard
above a cacophony of other voices. Most of the text was composed of long passages
from figures as varied as Herodotus, Thomas Jefferson, and the Philadelphia
phrenologist Samuel George Morton, and addressed debates over polygenesis,
climate, and antiquity that would have meant little to workingmen, but were
familiar to middle-class Americans in an era where ethnological ideas circulated
widely in periodical literature and learned societies.74 Campbell’s editing of excerpts
he probably culled from works in his bookstore just about holds the hodgepodge
together well enough to discern the outlines of his argument: first, that people of
African descent were incapable of building a civilization and therefore naturally
submitted to the superior energy and intellect of whites; second, that the difference
between the different branches of the Caucasian race was considerably smaller than
the gulf between whites and blacks; and third, that abolition, as a crime against
nature, would have disastrous social consequences for the producing classes
especially. On this last point he took an alarmingly unequivocal line. ‘‘The plain
fact of the matter is,’’ he wrote in the conclusion, in regard to Pennsylvania’s free
black population, ‘‘that we must take sufficient steps ere long to get rid of our
Negroes, either by colonization or otherwise; but get rid of them we must.’’75 In 1848,
Campbell had cast monopoly as the engine of history; three years later, his
materialism had been supplanted by supposedly iron laws of race.
But like Theory, Negro-mania
indeed for that matter all of Campbell’s racial turn
in 1851
needs to be read as a tactical intervention designed to bolster his leadership
claim in a movement of white producers. That is not to imply that his racism was not
real (his unrelenting hatred for the ‘‘wooly-headed,’’ as he called blacks, was no mere
fad, as his Civil War career would show76) but rather that it acquired particular
salience
and was used in the pursuit of particular ends
as debates among radicals
over nativism and slavery reached fever pitch in the summer of 1851. Campbell was
 American Nineteenth Century History 215

no doubt concerned by the split in Philadelphia’s Assembly of Associated Mechanics

and Workingmen which would culminate in anti-immigrant delegates bolting the
movement when it endorsed one of their fiercest critics, the future Radical
Republican William D. Kelley, for office that August; he tried to intervene in a
meeting held in favor of a popular nativist that October, but was barred from
speaking.77 As Campbell worked on Negro-mania, it became clear that the Assembly’s
foray into electoral politics had only succeeded in laying bare the underlying tensions
between its native- and foreign-born followers, and at points he used the book to
undermine the scientific basis for ethnic fragmentation. Rather ineptly, for some of
the extracts Campbell included arrived at precisely the opposite conclusion, Negro-
mania set out to demonstrate the common origins of what he persistently referred to
as the ‘‘white’’ race, challenging the dogma that held ‘‘Celts’’ were at best different and
at worst inferior to those of ‘‘Nordic’’ or ‘‘Anglo-Saxon’’ stock.78
Certainly Campbell’s critics saw his racial views as a lens onto Hibernian
insecurities. Henry C. Wright, after observing Campbell’s attack on George
Thompson, told William Lloyd Garrison that ‘‘the Irish, almost without exception,
. . . the moment they land here, identify themselves with the Slave Power, and
become the noisiest, most violent and murderous supporters of slavery.’’79 The
attorney William T. Risler likewise argued only the ‘‘bitter rivalry’’ between Celt and
African explained Campbell’s ‘‘foolish attempt’’ to ‘‘brand’’ the latter with the mark
of ‘‘natural inferiority.’’ He went on to suggest that Philadelphia’s free black
community was far better equipped for citizenship than most Irish voters, whose
‘‘nature . . . unfits them for civil government.’’80 If Campbell’s assertion of rough
white equality was an attempt to dampen the flames of ethnic tension among white
workers, then, it only succeeded in fanning them. Not only did it fail to save the
Assembly, which folded soon after the October election, but it drew attention to his
own foreign (and worse, Catholic) roots.
The barbs of abolitionists and wealthy nativists would have mattered little,
though, if Campbell’s racial politics had restored his waning influence among the
city’s workingmen. Despite his regular appearances at meetings and the prominence
many of his allies enjoyed in the Trades’ Assembly, there are hints in his letters to the
Tribune of his distance from the producers he claimed to represent. In August 1850,
in the midst of a dispute between boss and journeymen carpenters, Power introduced
a set of resolutions to a meeting of the striking workers that called on them to
‘‘support with our greatest energies the movements now making through our great
Republic in behalf of down-trodden Labor,’’ to ‘‘prevent the causes of revolution and
bloodshed by maintaining a living price for our Labor,’’ to elevate the workingman
‘‘above the position of a wages slave,’’ and to recognize that ‘‘the laboring man is
entitled to the full product of his own labor.’’ Power’s practical program here was
lifted largely from Theory
indeed he read aloud from Campbell’s tract
and his
plan for Philadelphia’s 1800 carpenters to set up a central shop with branches bore
more than a faint echo of his friend’s design for national workshops.81 Both old and
new labor historians have implied that the irrelevance of utopian designs to the city’s
working class weakened Campbell’s position in radical circles, and there is some
evidence for this.82 At a moment when strikes finally seemed to be delivering higher
216 A. Heath

rates and better working conditions, Campbell and his allies, while supporting them
as short-term expedients, publicly doubted their long-term effectiveness. The ‘‘radical
revivalist’’ carpenter A. J. Russell, meanwhile, told Power that ‘‘nobody believed a
word’’ of Theory, yet his objections seem to have been more about the revolutionary
language of its apostle than its promise of a future of equal exchanges. Russell faced
down the resolutions with a series of objections: Philadelphia’s carpenters had their
own battle to fight and did not need distractions, they were not wage slaves, and their
bosses were not oppressors.83
Power’s views at the meeting received short shrift, then, as much on account of
their militant tone as their utopian prescriptions. Even the usually sympathetic
Tribune observed Campbell ‘‘seems to have no idea of any other relation between
Labor and Capital than one of War.’’84 In alienating Russell, Campbell and Power
made a powerful enemy, and the carpenter not only ejected the radical duo from the
gathering, but supported a unanimous motion to bar all but ‘‘journeymen
mechanics’’ at the inauguration of the Assembly a few months later.85 Campbell’s
exclusion from a movement he hoped to spearhead must have proved galling,
especially as he had tried to find work as a handloom weaver in Philadelphia, and had
only turned to bookselling (or so he claimed) in desperation. He certainly still saw
himself as a workingman
albeit one producing knowledge if not goods
and his
lament in the Tribune that radicals ‘‘dread that men who do not belong to a trade may
use them’’ suggests his frustration. Race, Campbell probably hoped, would make him
relevant once more.86
Once it is read against the backdrop of nativism, sectional crisis, and its author’s
waning influence among workingmen, Negro-mania can be seen as an attempt to rally
native and immigrant producers behind a banner of white supremacy. Campbell
clearly pictured himself standing in the vanguard of a revitalized labor movement.
Through the summer of 1851 he continued to appear at labor meetings, and along
with his allies crossed the Delaware to rally strikers behind New Jersey’s ten-hour
law.87 But racial politics now poisoned his producerist vision, as he cast himself as the
voice of white workingmen facing down Philadelphia’s elite. As he told it, his struggle
to demonstrate black inferiority had been a heroic undertaking in a city in which
‘‘sham humanitarians’’ would ‘‘hunt . . . to the death’’ the ‘‘unfortunate utterer of
the truth.’’ Having ‘‘dared’’ the abolitionists to debate at the SIS, he found ‘‘nearly
every speaker’’ against him at the outset; gradually, though, ‘‘the nature of the
evidence, and the character of the authority’’ he cited proved so ‘‘irresistible’’ that
they were won over to his side.88 In the narrow circles of radical reform, where
antislavery sentiments were widely shared, there may have been a grain of truth in
Campbell’s hyperbolic rhetoric, but his suggestion that just two years before ‘‘men
were afraid in Philadelphia to speak out their opinions of the Negro’’ is laughable.
Rioters had torched an abolitionist hall within hours of it opening in 1839, and over
the following decade, white mobs targeted blacks and antislavery agitators, often with
tacit blessing from the authorities. Just two years before Negro-mania made its bow,
indeed, a fire company and street gang affiliated with Irish-American Democrats had
participated in the torching of a tavern run by a mixed-race couple. ‘‘There is not
perhaps anywhere to be found a city in which prejudice against color is more
 American Nineteenth Century History 217

rampant than in Philadelphia,’’ Frederick Douglass argued a few years later.89

Campbell’s contempt for blacks, then, was not a principled stand against the tyranny
of public opinion, but a gambit designed to appeal to the racial prejudices of his
intended audience.
Indeed, by taking on his erstwhile allies in abolitionist circles, the SIS, and land
reform movement, Campbell was deliberately distancing himself from the world of
middle-class reform and appealing directly to the workingmen he was losing
influence with. His revolt against the admission of a black delegate to the NIC had
already won him plaudits in the trades’ assembly, which unanimously resolved that
Evans’s organization had failed to ‘‘represent the opinions of the working people of
the city and county of Philadelphia,’’ while isolating Elder’s Real Estate Association,
the group that had sent Bowers to Albany.90 Negro-mania aimed to build on this
success by purporting to speak for the interests of white producers. Campbell, who
from his days as a Chartist lecturer had fashioned a role for himself as a kind of
organic intellectual bringing political enlightenment to the ignorant and the weak,
directed the book towards exactly the same audience he had intended for Theory.
‘‘Few poor men,’’ he argued, ‘‘have the means of obtaining’’ the studies he drew on;
his work was designed to ‘‘popularize’’ a question and reach the ‘‘thousands upon
thousands’’ who without access to libraries might succumb to abolitionist ‘‘poison.’’91
Interwoven with the extracts from an incongruent array of authors, though, was a
social critique of antislavery as a movement spearheaded by capital. Returning to a
familiar theme, he doubted whether his critics ‘‘sympathize with the white laborer in
his endeavors to improve his social condition,’’ and alluding to his struggles over the
summer of 1851 to enforce the ten-hour law in New Jersey, he noticed how many of
the opponents of such factory legislation were ‘‘rabid abolitionists.’’ There were
‘‘humanitarians in the world who manifest the most intense sympathy for the wrongs
of the wooly-headed race, but who never think of the white working-man’s wrongs,’’
he railed.92
In keeping with his earlier works, moreover, Campbell’s argument in Negro-mania
rested on a theory of exploitation. Over the course of his career, he had repeatedly
contended the unproductive elements of society fed parasitically on the labor of the
producing classes; as a British Chartist and American radical he often tried to
quantify the cost of the former to the latter, arguing for example in a speech at
Manchester that working people were robbed of £1 a week to support the church, the
poor law, local taxes, landlords, bankers, merchants and so on.93 By Theory, his
taxonomy of nonproducers had extended to include the likes of manufacturers,
judges, and soldiers, and the rate of exploitation increased to $9 in every $11 of value
produced.94 Though the relentless focus on racial character in Negro-mania suggests a
sea change in Campbell’s world-historical vision, in practice, he merely added blacks
to his list of the indolent and invited white workingmen to ponder the impact of
emancipation once they had millions of former slaves to support. ‘‘The Negro if left
to himself would not work,’’ he insisted, but ‘‘will lie down and bask in the sun.’’
Northern ‘‘alms houses, grogshops and gaols would be crammed to suffocation, and
as a consequence, the free white operative would be compelled to pay all the expenses
necessary to support this idle, drunken, lazy population.’’95 Many of the final extracts
218 A. Heath

in Negro-mania developed this theme, as writers dwelt on the experience of

emancipation in the Caribbean. Turning to Haiti, one contended that no act of
government ‘‘can induce the young creoles to labor, or depart from their habitual
licentiousness and vagrancy.’’96 People of African descent, Campbell protested, were
slothful by nature. Their freedom could only increase the burden on what was already
a heavily exploited class of white producers.
In bidding to unite white producers against idle manufacturers and blacks,
however, Campbell failed. Negro-mania was poorly received in Philadelphia, and the
best reviews unsurprisingly came from the South, where De Bow’s Review, though
disconcerted by the biracial membership of the SIS, nevertheless thanked Campbell
‘‘for his manly effort in the true cause of civilization and humanity.’’97 Aside from a
few barbed criticisms in the abolitionist press (Campbell provocatively sent a copy to
the Pennsylvania Freeman, which called it ‘‘the most wasteful expenditure of paper,
ink, binding materials, and labor, we remember to have seen’’), and Risler’s brief
retort A Triumphant Refutation, it was largely ignored in the North. One of his friends
and fellow reformers remembered the book years later as a ‘‘violent and one-sided
diatribe’’ that ‘‘did not meet with public favor’’ and led to ‘‘financial embarrass-
ment.’’98 Nor did Campbell succeed in rallying white workingmen behind him against
middle-class reformers. In an address to strikers in Gloucester, New Jersey, that
August, he had accused William J. Mullen, a temperance advocate and organizer of
the OAM’s Workingmen’s Party, of opposing the state’s ten-hour legislation. Mullen
retorted by claiming Campbell had ‘‘grossly misrepresented him,’’ and said that while
he was ultimately in favor of a six-hour day, he had come to try and secure the
operatives’ work on the Pennsylvania Railroad or state works while their dispute
remained unresolved. His promise of patronage and political support was well
received, and though Power subsequently gave a stirring address, Campbell must have
regarded the meeting as a defeat. This appears to have been his last direct
intervention in a labor dispute.99
By the end of the Civil War, Campbell’s friends were more likely to be found
among the city’s elite Democrats than the nation’s white workingmen, and if he had
made his stand on race in the hope of uniting Philadelphia’s journeymen, he must
have been sorely disappointed by the result. It would be tempting here to claim that
white workers had consciously rejected his color politics; many of them no doubt did
see Negro-mania as the outpouring of a crank. More probably, though, the book
failed because unlike Theory, it took root in unpromising soil. By the time it came
out, the city’s trades’ association had run aground on the shoals of nativism, and only
a handful of ‘‘pure and simple’’ craft unions survived. The likes of the printers’ union
prospered in the 1850s by banishing divisive talk of sectional issues in favor of
protecting piece rates and controlling entry into the trade. Meanwhile, Thompson’s
visit, the episode at the NIC, and the ‘‘equality’’ debates at the SIS splintered the
close-knit world of reform. Campbell was left without any allies in land reform and
labor politics and retreated instead to the Democrats, where his racial politics and
hostility to Britain chimed with the course the party took in the years leading up to
the Civil War.100 In the crisis of the union, he backed Stephen Douglas for the White
House, railed against treasonous secessionists and ‘‘dough-face’’ northerners, and
 American Nineteenth Century History 219

then did another about turn by turning his bookstore into a fount of Copperhead
literature.101 While his opposition to the Lincoln administration probably owed more
to its assault on civil liberties than slavery, his racial views appear to have changed
little from 1851. One of his friends confided from the siege of Petersburg, for
example, that the Union defeat at the Battle of the Crater could be blamed entirely on
‘‘the cowardly conduct of the niggers,’’ and after the war Campbell praised Andrew
Johnson, whose administration had treated the defeated states with such leniency, as
a ‘‘Philosopher and patriot.’’102 Like Johnson, the fierce critic of aristocracy and
monopoly had wound up with some decidedly conservative friends, and the alliances
he forged in the war were largely with Philadelphia’s prosouthern upper class, who
used his bookshop as a meeting place.
If Campbell’s attempt to rally white producers around the banner of race failed,
though, the debates of 1851 may have contributed to the remaking of antislavery
politics in Philadelphia. For Elder, a stalwart of the Liberty and Free Soil parties, the
controversies of that summer made him realize the futility of independent political
action. Writing just before the NIC, and with Campbell and his allies surely in mind,
he argued in a Washington newspaper that ‘‘the question of personal liberty or chattel
slavery is by no means the principal one of the times’’ for the nation’s white workers.
Struggling to make a living themselves, Elder continued, ‘‘they are not so much at
ease in their own condition as to feel the impulses of a disinterested philanthropy.’’
‘‘In truth,’’ he concluded, ‘‘it is the great problem of labor, its relations to capital, or
the system of property, that occupies these people. Bring them a system of rights and
remedies in this interest, and they will listen.’’103 Such a stance was not so far from
Campbell’s, but unlike his fellow reformer, Elder strove to popularize antislavery
doctrine, an achievement that had eluded the third parties of the 1840s. His
conclusions in 1851 were pessimistic, but with the collapse of the Whigs over the
following three years, an opportunity presented itself, and he became one of
Philadelphia’s earliest converts to the Republican cause. As several historians have
pointed out, the city’s Republicans downplayed their party’s abolitionist roots and
emphasized instead the benefits of its program of tariffs and homestead reform
offered to white workers. Elder exemplified this transformation, and by 1856, the
former officer of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery had
abandoned the doctrine of immediate emancipation in favor of a free labor ideology
that lauded the ‘‘mechanic arts’’ as the force ‘‘that makes men free.’’104
For all their differences, the printers Elder and Campbell shared the view that the
relationship between labor and capital was at least as important as that of master and
slave in determining the future of America before the Civil War. Nor were they alone.
The ‘‘labor question,’’ as it would become known in the postbellum era, already
occupied the attention of midcentury middle- and working-class reformers, who read
events like the European revolutions of 1848 as harbingers of a coming social
transformation in the New World. They also came to recognize
albeit in very
different ways
that the future of white and black labor could not be separated.
When driven by national events and his own ambition to confront the slavery issue at
midcentury, Campbell immersed himself in racial theory to arrive at the conclusion
that ‘‘idle’’ blacks would live off the toil of the producing classes. Elder in contrast
220 A. Heath

stuck to a line hinted at in Theory: chattel slaves and wage laborers had a common
interest in resisting exploitation. Neither position, however, fits especially well with
the scholarship that has framed debates on race and class in the antebellum north
over the last two decades, a literature more concerned with the racial politics of
artisanal republicanism and immigrant claims to ‘‘whiteness’’ than how workers
defined who produced wealth and who did not. Where Roediger argued the existence
of chattel slavery helped workingmen reconcile themselves to their position as wage
laborers, Elder’s contemporary assessment suggested they had little interest in a
subject that remained remote from them. In Campbell’s case, meanwhile, race was
simply tagged on to his producer ideology as he sought an issue that would unite
workingmen behind him. His racism was not a byproduct of working-class formation
in a slaveholding republic, but a set of ideas he had adopted from writers well outside
the tradition of working-class radicalism to show the supposed indolence of those of
African descent and to restore his waning influence.105
Campbell does not disprove the theoretical models of whiteness historians, or for
that matter the meticulously researched studies of Irish immigrant politics in
antebellum America. He was, after all, just one working-class leader among many,
and the failure of Negro-mania to capture the imagination of Philadelphia’s
journeymen and laborers may have owed something to its ideas jarring with a racial
idiom more familiar to its intended audience. Moreover, in contrast to most Irish-
Americans of his generation, his first experience of urban industrial society had come
in Britain rather than the United States, and by the time he wrote Negro-mania, he
had left the manual workforce for good, even if he still saw himself as a workingman.
Yet, despite these caveats, his career does lend support to historians who have called
for greater attention to context when generalizing about the responses of antebellum
American workers
and Irish immigrants
to questions of race and slavery. The
curious continuities and jarring shifts in Campbell’s worldview as he negotiated the
transatlantic world of radicalism and sectional strife
and the very different decisions
he made to his fellow reformers
indicate how the racial politics of the antebellum
labor movement were anything but straightforward. Rather, taking as an axiom that
the true source of wealth lay in labor, workingmen and their allies endeavored to
divide the world into the productive and the idle, a task that against the backdrop of
tumultuous national and international events forced them to grapple with questions
of ethnicity, race, and slavery in often unpredictable ways. The stance Campbell
eventually arrived at on these questions was by no means the only one available in the
1850s, as the actions of the printers’ union and Elder and his working-class allies in
the NRA showed. Where one retreated to pure and simple unionism, dividing
organized labor from ethnocultural and sectional politics, the other recognized that
the interests of white and black producers were fundamentally alike. Historians need
to pay attention to these alternative traditions before type-casting the ‘‘white worker’’
or ‘‘Irish immigrant,’’ but they might consider too how producerism, as well as
artisanal republicanism, could acquire a racial hue. Here Campbell’s failure over the
course of 1851 can prove instructive.
 American Nineteenth Century History 221

Notes
1. Campbell, Theory of Equality, esp. chapter 23; Campbell, Negro-mania, 6, 544.
2. Risler, Triumphant Refutation, 3
4.
3. Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro, 383.
4. McGovern, John Mitchel, xiii
xiv. See also Osofsky, ‘‘Abolitionists, Irish Immigrants’’;
Quinn, ‘‘Rise and Fall of Repeal’’; Lynch, ‘‘Defining Irish-Nationalist Anti-Imperialism’’;
Gleeson, ‘‘Securing the ‘Interests’ of the South.’’ On Mitchel’s arrival in Philadelphia, see
Public Ledger, November 28, 1853. For the quote, see Brotherhead, Old Booksellers of
Philadelphia, 37.
5. Cunliffe, Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery, 51, 56
7.
6. See for example Laurie, Beyond Garrison; Lause, Young America; Johnson, Liberty Party.
7. On the Democratic Party and Catholic Church as paths to integration for Irish-
Americans, see Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, chapter 7; Quinn, ‘‘Rise and Fall of Repeal,’’
76. Northern Star, May 15, 1841; Boston Investigator, July 23, 1845.
8. For the nineteenth century North, see Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, esp. chapters 3, 4,
and 7; Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness; Ignatiev, How the Irish Became
White; Gronowicz, Race and Class Politics in New York. Less interested in questions of
antebellum class formation are Saxton, Rise and Fall of the White Republic; Jacobson,
Whiteness of a Different Color; and Painter, White People.
9. Eric Arnesen offers a particularly trenchant critique of whiteness studies. See Arnesen,
‘‘Whiteness and the Historian’s Imagination.’’ Other work of a more or less critical bent
includes Foner, ‘‘Response to Eric Arnesen’’; Fields, ‘‘Whiteness, Racism, and Ethnicity’’;
Kolchin, ‘‘Whiteness Studies’’; Holt, ‘‘Racism and the Working Class.’’ More sympathetic
treatments include Brody, ‘‘Charismatic History’’; Barrett, ‘‘Whiteness Studies.’’
10. Kolchin, ‘‘Whiteness Studies,’’ 160; Arnesen, ‘‘Whiteness and the Historian’s Imagina-
tion,’’ 22.
11. Commons et al., History of Labour, vol. 1, 516.
12. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 41. Campbell does not appear in the index to Ignatiev’s
How the Irish Became White, despite the book focusing on Philadelphia. Other brief
mentions include Moreno, Black Americans and Organized Labor, 9, which mistakenly
identifies Campbell as the leader of the city’s printer’s union. Beyond the whiteness
literature, Negro-mania is discussed in O’Brien, Conjectures of Order, vol. 1, 240; Curtin,
Image of Africa, vol. 2, 372; Finseth, Shades of Green, 122
3.
13. The best study of Philadelphia’s antebellum working class, for example, discusses
Campbell in some detail but does not mention Negro-mania. See Laurie, Working People
of Philadelphia, 165, 168, 192. In the standard history of Philadelphia, Campbell is
mentioned briefly as a working-class leader who excluded blacks. See Geffen, ‘‘Industrial
Development and Social Crisis,’’ 339. The fullest treatment of Campbell’s political
economic vision, Dorfman’s The Economic Mind in American Civilization, vol. 2, 689
93
devotes a short paragraph to his racial politics, noting that like several other reformers,
‘‘he took the extreme southern attitude on the question of slavery.’’
14. Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, chapter 3. Campbell’s role in the land reform
movement is treated well in Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience, 34,
54
5, 60, 71
2, 91
2, 98
9, 149; and Lause, Young America, 79, 93, 107. While both
address Negro-mania, their attention to the national context misses much of his local
activism. The fullest account of his career is in Boston, British Chartists in America, esp.
59
67, which covers his life in England, emigration to the United States, and his
proslavery turn. Boston argues that Campbell could not conceive of any form of
exploitation worse than wage labor, but struggles to account for the virulence of his
racism.
15. Wilentz, Chants Democratic, chapter 2; Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 20
1.
222 A. Heath

16. On producerism, or ‘‘producer ideology,’’ see Currarino, Labor Question in America, esp.
chapter 1, which distinguishes between the ‘‘proprietary producerism’’ of midcentury
and the ‘‘industrial producerism’’ of the Gilded Age; Laurie, Working People of
Philadelphia, esp. 202.
17. Campbell’s Chartist career is treated in Boston, British Chartists in America, 58; and
Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists.
18. See for example Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, chapter 3.
19. Leeds Northern Star, June 20, 1840, May 15, 29, 1841.
20. Northern Star, May 29, June 5, 1841. Campbell may have been responsible for the rumors
that Repealers were planning to assassinate him.
21. Northern Star, May 15, 1841; Campbell, Examination of the Corn and Provision Laws, 37,
47
8.
22. Campbell, Examination of the Corn and Provision Laws, 39
43, 47.
23. W. Camas, letter to Northern Star, December 17, 1842; John Campbell to Boston
Investigator, July 23, 1845. Boston, British Chartists in America, 58
9.
24. On industrialisation and labor ethnic strife in Philadelphia, see Warner, Private City;
Geffen, ‘‘Industrial Development and Social Crisis’’; Laurie, Working People of
Philadelphia; Feldberg, Philadelphia Riots of 1844; and Ignatiev, How the Irish Became
White.
25. John Campbell to Boston Investigator, July 23, 1845.
26. Montgomery, ‘‘The Shuttle and the Cross.’’
27. Public Ledger, December 25, 1844.
28. John Campbell to Boston Investigator, 23 July 1845; Boston, British Chartists in America,
60; Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 165.
29. Northern Star, October 2, 1847.
30. Boston Investigator, February 28, 1844; Brotherhead, Old Booksellers of Philadelphia, 37;
Campbell, letters to New York Tribune, August 6, November 1, 1850. Radicals’ support
for French terrorists alienated them from the mainstream of party politics, where
comparing opponents to the likes of Robespierre was a good way to discredit them. See
Cleves, Reign of Terror in America. Campbell wrote a book on the French revolutionaries
of the 1790s, but I have not been able to locate an extant copy.
31. See for example Roberts, Distant Revolutions.
32. Public Ledger, April 25, 1848; North American and United States Gazette, April 25, 1848.
33. Public Ledger, April 25, 1848. Grand was not alone in linking the French and American
‘‘bourgeoisie’’ in Philadelphia. See also Foster and English, French Revolution of 1848, 9,
160
3, 172.
34. Philadelphia Inquirer, May 18, 1848.
35. Campbell, Theory of Equality, iii
iv.
36. Ibid., 23.
37. Ibid., 87. Campbell’s ideas on land also owed a clear debt to Thomas Spence, Thomas
Skidmore, and John Francis Bray.
38. Ibid., 73
5, 83
4.
39. Ibid., 109
10; chapter 23. The idea of ‘‘labor notes’’ came from Josiah Warren.
40. Commons, et al., History of Labour, vol. 1, 516. On Bray, see Bronstein, John Francis Bray.
41. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 75.
42. Campbell, Theory of Equality, 15
16, 96. Campbell, letter to New York Tribune, December
27, 1850.
43. The word ‘‘negro’’ does not appear in Theory, nor does any epithet for people of African
descent.
44. Campbell, Theory of Equality, 101, 24, 28, 16.
45. See for example Campbell, Theory of Equality, 14, 23, 39, 88, 90, 116.
46. On the response to Theory, see New York Herald, May 4, 1848; Olwine’s Law Journal,
January 5, 1850; Inquirer, April 18, 1848. For a neutral review, see Philadelphia Inquirer,
 American Nineteenth Century History 223

April 18, 1848. See letters in New York Tribune of August 6, September 28, November 1,
29, December 13, 27, 1850; April 19, 26, July 29, 1851. On the Tribune’s politics, see
Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Commons describes Campbell as Greeley’s
correspondent on the Philadelphia labor movement for several years, and other
historians probably took this to mean he was employed by the paper. He may have
been paid occasionally for his contributions, but his letters were clearly written of his
own accord, and were not always published. See Campbell, letter to New York Tribune,
July 29, 1851. Campbell’s own capacity for self-promotion may have led Commons to
overstate his importance. When one Philadelphian after the Civil War said of Campbell
the Chartist that ‘‘his ability’’ was ‘‘great and his influence over his fellows considerable,’’
he may not have been wrong, but it seems likely that Campbell or one of his acolytes had
convinced him of the point. Philadelphia Daily Age, May 26, 1866.
47. Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 180
1, 191.
48. Brotherhead, Old Booksellers of Philadelphia, 36; Public Ledger, July 7, 1851.
49. Dorfman, Economic Mind, vol. 2, 693.
50. Public Ledger, July 16, 1851; Tribune, August 6, 1850.
51. Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience, 1
3. See also Lause, Young
America; Huston, Land and Freedom, 138. On land, Ireland, and Irish-Americans, see
Snay, Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites, 83
90, which focuses mostly on the
postbellum era.
52. Northern Star, May 14, 1839; October 2, 1847. Campbell was serving as secretary to the
local branch of the NRA by September. See Public Ledger, September 15, 1847.
53. On the Tribune and land reform, see Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune,
chapter 5. Campbell, Theory of Equality, 96.
54. John Campbell, letter to New York Tribune, April 19, 1851.
55. Laurie, Artisans into Workers, 67, for example, calls it of ‘secondary’ importance, albeit in
a slightly earlier period.
56. North American and United States Gazette, June 14, 1848; Campbell, letter to New York
Tribune, April 26, 1851; Public Ledger, June 26, 1851.
57. Membership Certificate, Brotherhood of the Union Collection. On the organization, see
Butterfield, ‘‘George Lippard and His Secret Brotherhood.’’ Lippard spoke at Campbell’s
Social Improvement Society. See Public Ledger, February 15, 1851.
58. Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 168
77.
59. John Campbell to New York Tribune, November 29, 1850.
60. Northern Star, May 15, 1851; Harrisburg Patriot, February 12, 1866. Campbell objected to
the means rather than the ends of Fenianism, but his willingness to speak out against the
movement suggests that even after the Civil War, he was far from a conventional Irish
nationalist. On Philadelphia’s Irish immigrants, see Clark, The Irish in Philadelphia.
61. Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 177
92.
62. Lause, Young America, chapter 6.
63. Public Ledger, November 16, 23, 30, December 14, 1850.
64. Public Ledger, 23, 30 November, 1850. Campbell’s social reformers debated the merits of
immediate abolition at least as early as 1848. Campbell discussed his theory of equality at
the same meeting. Public Ledger, February 19, 1848.
65. Campbell, Negro-mania, 3.
66. Public Ledger, March 1, 1851.
67. Cunliffe, Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery, 57
62.
68. Henry C. Wright to The Liberator, July 4, 1851. Campbell’s unionism here places him in
stark contrast to another Irish refugee, John Mitchel, who became a champion of
southern nationalism. Where Mitchel appears to have seen the South’s relationship to the
rest of the nation as analogous to Ireland’s ties to Britain, Campbell seems to have
believed that the anti-imperial cause everywhere was best served by maintaining the
territorial integrity of the United States. After the Civil War, for example, he argued the
224 A. Heath

cause of Irish independence would be best served by a rapid reconciliation of North and
South. Harrisburg Patriot, February 12, 1866.
69. Lause, Young America, 107
8.
70. Haven, Slavery as it Exists.
71. Campbell to New York Herald, June 7, 1851.
72. Lause, Young America, 108; chapter 9.
73. Risler, Triumphant Refutation, 3; Pennsylvania Freeman, September 25, 1851.
74. Painter, White People, 190
200; Fredrickson, Black Image, 71
96.
75. Campbell, Negro-mania, 544.
76. Ibid., 8.
77. Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 195
7. Inquirer, October 7, 1851.
78. Campbell, Negro-mania, 290. On Anglo-Saxonism, see Horsman, Race and Manifest
Destiny.
79. Henry C. Wright, letter to The Liberator, July 4, 1851.
80. Risler, Triumphant Refutation, 4, 11.
81. Campbell to New York Tribune, August 6, 1850.
82. Commons et al., History of Labor, vol. 1, 516; Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 168,
192.
83. Campbell to New York Tribune, August 6, 1850.
84. New York Tribune, August 6, 1850.
85. Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 192.
86. Campbell to New York Tribune, November 29, 1850.
87. Public Ledger, July 7, 12, August 4, 1851. John Campbell, letter to New York Tribune,
August 4, 1851.
88. Campbell, Negro-mania, 543.
89. Kilbride, American Aristocracy, 148.
90. Public Ledger, June 17, 1851.
91. Campbell, Negro-mania, 4, 546.
92. Ibid., 469
70, 160; Boston, British Chartists in America, 61.
93. Northern Star, May 15, 1841.
94. Campbell, Theory of Equality, 73
5.
95. Campbell, Negro-mania, 459.
96. See for example Ibid., 490, 500, 514
15, 519, 522. Campbell’s views here correspond to
those of Upper South whites in the era. See Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 186.
97. L.S.M., ‘‘Negro-mania,’’ DeBow’s Review (May, 1852), 512, 524. For other southern
reaction, see ‘‘Equality of the Races
Negro Mania,’’ DeBow’s Review (December, 1851);
J.T., ‘‘Negro-mania
Race,’’ Southern Quarterly Review (January, 1852), 153; ‘‘Negro-
mania,’’ Southern Literary Messenger (October to November, 1851), 702
3.
98. Pennsylvania Freeman, September 25, 1851; Risler, Triumphant Refutation; Brotherhead,
Old Booksellers of Philadelphia, 37. For more favorable treatments, see Pittsburgh Daily
Morning Post, December 2, 1851.
99. Public Ledger, August 4, 1851.
100. Campbell allied with the Irish-American Democrat Lewis C. Cassidy, fell out of favor
with James Buchanan, and tried to recruit the Virginia governor Henry M. Wise to run
in 1860. See, for example, Henry M. Wise to Campbell, December 2, 25, 1857, Folder
1857, Box 3a, William J. Campbell Collection, Ms. Coll. 745, Special Collections, Temple
University Library, Philadelphia.
101. Campbell to Philadelphia Press, January 29, 1861; Campbell, Unionists versus Traitors;
Brotherhead, Old Booksellers of Philadelphia, 38
9. For an example of Campbell’s
wartime publishing, see Reed, Vindication of Certain Political Opinions.
102. Isaac Leach to Campbell, August 16, 1864, Folder 1864, Box 3a, William J. Campbell
Collection, Temple University, Special Collections; Campbell to Andrew Johnson, April
 American Nineteenth Century History 225

15, 1869, in Bergeron, The Papers of Andrew Johnson, Volume 15, September 1868 to
April 1869, 592.
103. Elder, Third Parties, 12
13. On Elder’s politics, see Johnson, Liberty Party, 229
30, 339;
Wasington Daily National Era, March 11, 1854.
104. Boston Daily Atlas, February 15, 1856. See for example Dusinberre, Civil War Issues;
Weigley, ‘‘The Border City in the Civil War,’’ 383; McCaffery, When Bosses Ruled
Philadelphia, 7.
105. Horsman argues that by midcentury race had ‘‘become a topic of general intellectual and
popular interest,’’ but his sources
like Campbell’s
are drawn almost exclusively from
middle-class writers. See Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 139.

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