Mobs have attacked U.S. temples of freedom before

I was a firsthand witness to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Inside the House chamber, we heard shouts, footsteps, and gunshots. Speaker Nancy Pelosi was rushed off the floor. The rest of us, representatives and journalists, stayed as frozen as the Rotunda statues.

The thousands who stormed the terrace, breaking windows and doors to gain entry, were white nationalists loyal to the president who lost the 2020 election. His name is now emblazoned all over Washington: Donald Trump.

That was not only an attack on the building itself. That bitter day destroyed an illusion we Americans held dear about our nation: Fair is fair. Win or lose, peace prevailed in our elections. We took pride in our place as the world’s oldest democracy.

History shows that much the same thing happened in Philadelphia, the Quaker city where our cherished founding documents were drawn up by the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

But slavery festered in Jacksonian America, and open hostility to abolitionists was common. Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist editor, was murdered by a mob in Alton, Ill. Philadelphia was not spared.

In 1838, a majestic new building changed the Philadelphia cityscape. Built by the Society of Friends (the Quakers) for abolitionist gatherings, Pennsylvania Hall was envisioned as a temple of liberty and free speech, with elegant touches like damask drapes and a sunflower-shaped mirror.

There, Philadelphia Quakers worked with “the world’s people,” as they called non-Quakers — notably Bostonians and Unitarians — to speak out against slavery. Fiery William Lloyd Garrison spoke during opening week. The Grimké sisters, Sarah and Angelina, white abolitionists from South Carolina who had fled North and become Friends, bore witness to the evils of slavery.

It did not last long.

Founded in 1833, the American Anti-Slavery Society stood just a few blocks away.

Lucretia Mott, the leading Philadelphia Quaker abolitionist voice, cofounded the Female Anti-Slavery Society. And it was Mott who most enraged some Southerners studying medicine in the city.

The medical students jeered at Black and white female abolitionists walking together in pairs, a procession led by Mott. The word for Black-white mixed company in those days was “amalgamation,” and the racist Southerners would not tolerate it, hurling insults at the members of the Female Anti-Slavery Society.

A shattering night shocked Philadelphia’s civic pride as a haven for freedom and democracy.

On Sixth Street, the students grew into a pack of hundreds, perhaps thousands, rioting and eventually focusing on the beautiful hall, which they burst into and set ablaze in one of the worst mob scenes in antebellum America.

But the rampage was not over. Lucretia and James Mott, their son, Thomas, and others went to the Mott home on North Ninth Street. They sensed the mob might be looking for them, and they were right.

They were spared an ugly scene by the Quaker poet and journalist, John Greenleaf Whittier. He kept pace with the moving mob as it shouted, “To the Motts!” and pointed them in the wrong direction. (Much as Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman did in the U.S. Senate on Jan. 6.)

Instead, the mob damaged Mother Bethel, a Black church and the oldest African Methodist Episcopal congregation in the nation, as well as a nearby Black orphanage.

That shattering night shocked Philadelphia’s civic pride as a haven for freedom and democracy. Was it a place where the free Black community could still feel safe? Clearly not.

For sobered antislavery advocates, the riot and fire landed as a moment of reckoning. Violence in Philadelphia meant they had an even more determined foe in proslavery forces than they had thought. Abolitionists would have to rise from the ashes and press their campaign harder for the next 25 years.

Today, we may see Pennsylvania Hall’s burning as a template for the savage attack on the Capitol in our own era. White nationalism, no stranger to America’s streets, rose again — with a vengeance.

Jamie Stiehm, author of “The War Within” and a Creators Syndicate columnist, is at work on a biography of Lucretia Mott. She lives in Washington, D.C.