ACROSS CHESTNUT STREET FROM INDEPENDENCE HALL, A statue of Benjamin Franklin stood on a corner podium of the Ledger building on Sixth Street. On the morning of July 4, while scattered showers kept some off the cobblestone streets, newsboys sold two-cent papers underneath the eyes of the Philadelphia hero. The Ledger headlines reviewed Philadelphia’s Independence Day activities, lightning storms in Maryland, and the president’s vacation plans. At the top of the front page, the editor had posted a notice under the title “Too Late for Classification.”
300$ REWARD WILL BE PAID TO THE person returned to No 5 North Sixth Street, a small Boy, having long, curly, flaxen hair, hazel eyes, clear, light-skinned round face, dressed in a brown linen suit with a short skirt, broad buttoned straw hat and laced shoes. This child was lost from Germantown on Wednesday afternoon. 1st lost, between 4 and 5 o’clock.
Christian Ross had spent the previous night at police headquarters. Early the next morning, he walked across Sixth Street, hoping that the detectives were right and a reward had prompted Charley’s return. If and when a reader of the morning’s Ledger brought Charley to the news building, Christian wanted to be there before his little boy arrived. He waited until 9:00 A.M.
Back at Independence Hall, Mayor William Stokley entered the City Council chamber. One of Philadelphia’s longest-running mayors, Stokley took great pride in the power he held over the second largest city in the country. His constituents numbered close to 800,000, more than 20 percent of whom worked in the 8,000 factories contained within the city’s 120 square miles. Manufacturing defined Philadelphia during industrialization, but so did its Republican majority: almost five times as many Republicans held councilmen positions as did Democrats, and in 1872, Ulysses S. Grant accepted the Republican nomination for president at the city’s Academy of Music.
William Stokley had also been the figurehead of the police department since 1871, when he won the mayoral election on a platform against urban violence. Fights between independent fire companies were among the many that flared on the streets, and Stokley, a former volunteer fireman, knew the city had to intervene. His first political act was to establish a paid fire department, a decision that curbed firehouse feuding but failed to address the two main sources of street violence: ethnic tension and unemployment. By the first years of Reconstruction, the immigrant community in Philadelphia had grown to one third of the city’s population, and as industrialization absorbed artisan jobs, native sons blamed the factories and the foreigners for destroying their family businesses. Craftsmen organized themselves politically, neighborhoods organized themselves socially, and resentment fueled riots among blacks, whites, Italians, Irish Catholics, Whigs, and Democrats. City leaders took sides, and the police often joined the fights.
The press accused Stokley’s force of ignorance and underperformance. Aiming to improve his officers’ images and prove his leadership skills, the mayor began surprising them on the job. He immediately fired those who appeared drunk, unkempt, or lazy. The public excoriations promoted Stokley as a disciplinarian, but more professional-looking officers didn’t change the social temperature. Matters became worse in the economic recession that began as the Panic of 1873: most factory workers remained employed, but other city wages dropped 10 percent, and thousands of railway workers were jobless during the winter of 1873 to 1874. As bread lines grew longer, the press criticized police for honoring capitalist wishes by failing to protect the working class. Stokley’s solution was to hire more officers. Five days before July 4, he added 200 men to the force.
Mayor Stokley had heard about Charley Ross’s disappearance on July 3, and he knew many of his new hires were looking for the kidnappers’ horse and wagon. On the morning of the fourth, however, Stokley had bigger things to do than worry about a missing child. In two years, Philadelphia would host America’s Centennial celebration, and he had a party to plan.
The nation’s leaders wanted the Centennial to honor America’s history. When the founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, four million Americans had settled the country’s thirteen states. One hundred years later, the nation had grown into 40 million people and thirty-eight states. Great pride and great cost had fostered such progress. Most notably, a Union victory had ended the Civil War nine years before the disappearance of Charley Ross. The states formed one country, but 600,000 soldiers had died, and freed slaves struggled to find work even in the North. Capitalists had channeled the nation’s resources into wealth, but bad investments had bankrupted small businesses and industrial growth sparked ethnic riots. So as much as the nation’s leaders wanted the Centennial to honor America’s history, they needed it to secure America’s future. Americans had to feel united in order to produce a sustainable economy in the aftermath of war. By showcasing inventions and art forms, the Centennial could appeal to their cultural heritage, spark their patriotism, and thus encourage their acceptance of future government initiatives.
Stokley greeted his honored guests inside the city council chamber. The men—councilmen, Centennial commission members, highway commissioners—wore blue ribbons on their jackets. Together, they exited the rear of the building and marched toward eight carriages a block away on Walnut Street. Seven of the carriages turned right and took a scenic route through the central district to the east banks of the Schuylkill River. The mayor’s carriage went directly to the Centennial excavation grounds on the opposite side of the river. There, as he approached the park’s west entrance, Stokley entered a pastoral scene.
Trees lined both riverbanks, and across the Schuylkill, promontory rock formed natural cliffs that hid a railroad and passing freight trains from walkers and horseback riders who meandered along the river’s edge. In the middle of the water, small falls toppled through the Water-Works purification facility, a Greek Revival edifice engineered in the 1790s to cleanse the city from yellow fever. Stokley’s carriage followed the river’s curves. He arrived at the excavation site before 10:00 A.M., joining workmen who stood in the midst of shovels, tools, and carts. Stokley accepted an offered spade and dug into the ground. Workmen erupted into three cheers. When the mayor left, they would begin the work of transforming 450 of the park’s nearly 3,000 acres into an international showcase celebrating America’s first century of independence.
Stokley paraded a short distance from the west end of the new Girard Avenue Bridge, a structure one thousand feet long and one hundred feet wide. Engineers of the day believed it to be the widest bridge in the world, and most of the Centennial’s 10 million visitors would trek across it. The seven carriages full of men in blue ribbons turned onto the east side of the bridge and aligned themselves side by side before they slowly and simultaneously paraded across. From a footpath on the pier, invited guests applauded and whistled. Those not invited watched the procession from the riverbanks.
Christian waited at the Ledger building until mid-morning. Frustrated and defeated, he returned to the station. As he opened the door, a man yelled, “I have it! I have it!” It was the voice of one of his brothers-in-law. He handed Christian a letter that had been delivered to Ross, Schott, & Co. that morning. Officers in the station gathered around Christian.
July 3—Mr. Ros: be not uneasy you son charley bruster be all writ we is got him and no powers on earth can deliver out of our hand. you wil have two pay us before you git him from us, and pay us a big cent to. if you put the cops hunting for him you is only defeetin yu own end. we is got him put so no living power can gets him from us a live. If any approach is maid to his hidin place that is the signil for his instant annihilation. if you regard his lif puts no one to search for him yu mony can fech him out alive an no other existin powers. don’t deceve yuself an think the detectives can git him from us for that is imposebel. You here from us in few day.
Christian finished reading. Nobody spoke.
The eight carriages carrying Stokley and his guests drove back into the center of town around noon to witness the day’s third event: the dedication of City Hall’s cornerstone at Broad and Market Streets. William Penn had envisioned a municipal building on this very location, but the establishment of river communities and suburbs had delayed his plans for 180 years.
Five thousand attendees pushed toward the cornerstone site when Stokley arrived. Underneath an enclosure at the north end, thirty-seven paintings representing each state hung from thirty-seven poles. The mayor and his guests sat inside of a semicircle framed by the poles; small flags, streamers, and the city’s coat of arms decorated the cornerstone in front of them. The local Order of Masons called the ceremony to order, and after a few guest speeches, the Masons presented artifacts including copies of the Pennsylvania state constitution, the city charter, plans for City Hall, the annual message of the mayor, and the newspapers of July 4, 1874. As Stokley watched, the objects were placed inside the vault, which was then covered with marbleized slate and cemented with a stone cap. The cornerstone was sealed.
Benjamin A. Brewster, Pennsylvania’s attorney general and the future U.S. attorney general, gave the keynote address. In it, he remembered William Penn’s plan for the city and praised its ethnocentric pride:
“We have a manly local pride of citizenship; other seaboard cities are provincial or filled with strangers from other parts of the nation and from other countries, and Western cities are like New York, the homes of new men from old places. If a foreigner were to ask me where will I find a real American untouched in his character and nationality by the ever-drifting tide of emigration, domestic and foreign, and with no taint of provincial narrowness, I would say go to Philadelphia, and there you will find just such men and women by the hundreds of thousands.”
Newspapers declared the morning’s ceremonies a success and praised Mayor Stokley for his planning commission’s attention to detail. Over the next two years, the press would weigh Philadelphia’s civic issues with her Exhibition plans, reminding both citizens and politicians that the country’s international reputation depended upon Philadelphia’s hosting abilities. Congress expected the 1876 Centennial Exhibition to illustrate the state of America on the brink of her second century. And it would—by celebrating history, showcasing industrial progress, and assuring the world that the Civil War had not demoralized patriotism. This portrait, however, would be incorrect.
As Mayor Stokley stood at the end of the dedication ceremony, he didn’t realize that freshly buried in front of him, underneath the sealed cornerstone, was the beginning of a different story that would carry his name across the globe. It would be this narrative, and not the Centennial displays, that would honestly depict the American character during Reconstruction.
Stokley returned to Independence Hall that afternoon. When he entered central police headquarters, officers handed him an odd-looking letter. It told the mayor about a new crime: one that had developed under his watch, and one that would change the authority of his office. No longer the master of ceremonies, Mayor William Stokley found himself at the head of an investigation to solve the first recorded ransom kidnapping in American history.
And the world was making plans to visit his city.