by destroying a Negro resort. A mob then proceeded to the Negro district,
where white and colored men engaged in a fight with clubs and stones.

The next day the mob ruined the African Presbyterian Church and attacked
some Negroes, destroying their property and beating them mercilessly. This
riot continued for three days. A committee appointed to inquire into the
causes of the riot reported that the aim of the rioters had been to make
the Negroes go away because it was believed that their labor was depriving
them of work and because the blacks had shielded criminals and had made
such noise and disorder in their churches as to make them a nuisance. It
seemed that the most intelligent and well-to-do people of Philadelphia
keenly felt it that the city had thus been disgraced, but the mob spirit
continued.[19]

The very next year was marked by the same sort of disorder. Because a
half-witted Negro attempted to murder a white man, a large mob stirred up
the city again. There was a repetition of the beating of Negroes and of
the destruction of property while the police, as the year before, were so
inactive as to give rise to the charge that they were accessories to the
riot.[20] In 1838 there occurred another outbreak which developed into an
anti-abolition riot, as the public mind had been much exercised by the
discussions of abolitionists and by their close social contact with the
Negroes. The clash came on the seventeenth of May when Pennsylvania Hall,
the center of abolition agitation, was burned. Fighting between the blacks
and whites ensued the following night when the Colored Orphan Asylum was
attacked and a Negro church burned. Order was finally restored for the
good of all concerned, but that a majority of the people sympathized with
the rioters was evidenced by the fact that the committee charged with
investigating the disturbance reported that the mob was composed of
strangers who could not be recognized.[21] It is well to note here that