Reforms and Revivals Poverty and pauperism, urban missionaries, schools, reformatories, poorhouses, hospitals, jails.

“multiply the treasures of the rich” through their labor, the rich were “morally obligated to relieve a

necessitous person.” These dissenters made no headway against the massed prestige of the SPP, and

both municipal and state governments began to implement its recommendations. The Common Council

halted contributions to all charitable enterprises except for the Humane Society and the City

Dispensary. Governor De Witt Clinton proclaimed his intention to wipe out pauperism “by rendering

it a greater evil to live by charity than by industry.” In 1823 the legislature charged Secretary of State

John Van Ness Yates to report on the condition of the poor and the administration of relief throughout

the state. Echoing the SPP, Yates’s committee attributed pauperism to “vice of all kind”—especially

in New York City, which attracted the “idle and dissolute of every description.” Subsequent

legislation ended outdoor relief throughout New York State, except (to the SPP’s annoyance) in New

York City, where the dramatic fluctuations of the economy made it as yet impracticable and impolitic

to do so.

Private benevolence slacked off as well. The ad hoc ward committees that had helped the victims

of hard times during the embargo and war years now vanished, nowhere more abruptly than in

Brooklyn. In the terrible winter of 1817, when the thermometer plummeted to twenty-six below zero

and Buttermilk Channel iced over so thickly that horse-drawn sleighs crossed to Governors Island,

the Brooklyn Humane Society had set up a soup house for the distressed poor. But as the new maxims

of British political economy made their way across the East River, the society announced that its

benevolence had been misguided. Alms-giving, it now realized, had “a direct tendency to beget,

among a large portion of their fellow citizens, habits of imprudence, indolence, dissipation and

consequent pauperism.” Accordingly, the Humane Society announced that no food or firewood would

be forthcoming the following winter, and to hammer the point home, the group disbanded.

The efficacy of charity likewise fell under suspicion among the genteel women who led the

Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children. As recently as 1815 the ladies had

rejected the lazy-poor line and indeed reported that “an attentive observation has thoroughly

convinced us that it is an impossibility for a widow, with the labor of her own hands, to support her

infant family . . . even if work abound.” Then, however, the men of the SPP denounced the Relief

Society’s work on the grounds that giving charity to widows with children incited those without to

become pregnant, “which is highly immoral, and ought not be tolerated in a Christian land.” Despite

the best of intentions, in other words, the women had been “encouraging population among the poor,

and increasing the number of paupers,” a line of reasoning that won converts.

So how did the SPP propose to prevent pauperism in New York, beyond shutting down the flow of

ill-advised charity? The answer was to inculcate the undeserving poor with the values that would

make them useful and productive members of society: sobriety, cleanliness, industriousness, frugality,

punctuality, good manners, and the like. European precedents suggested a host of tactics, among them

savings banks, workhouses, Sunday schools, and a ban on street begging, all of which the SPP

advocated. Another possibility, currently underway in Glasgow and Hamburg, was the “moral

superintendence of neighborhoods.” The idea was to divide the city into districts, each of which

would be assigned to two or three well-bred visitors who could advise the poor on such matters as

domestic management, childrearing, and proper conduct. For several years SPP “visitors” fanned out

through the city, diligently compiling information on the background and character of every resident.

By 1821, though, the project had foundered. Only one district had a visitation system fully in place,

and that was a fashionable neighborhood where 90 percent of the householders were found to be of

“good” character and there wasn’t a pauper in sight.



URBAN MISSIONARIES



Evangelicals in the city had meanwhile discerned a connection between pauperism and religious

absenteeism. It was no secret that many poor New Yorkers were still unchurched—according to the

SPP itself, some fifteen thousand of the city’s twentyfive thousand families rarely if ever took part in

worship services—at least in part because poor neighborhoods had too few churches and their

residents weren’t often welcomed by congregations in well-to-do parts of town. Until it became

linked with the genteel revolt against charity, however, urban irreligion had aroused only fitful

interest among mainstream Christian denominations. The New-York Missionary Society, founded

back in 1796, targeted Indians and settlers on the frontier. The Society for Supporting the Gospel

Among the Poor of the City of New-York had been formed back in 1812, but its primary concern

remained the underwriting of John Stanford’s preaching to hospital, prison, and almshouse inmates.

All this changed after 1815, when a new generation of evangelicals began work “among the

destitute of our own city.” In 1818 the Female Missionary Society for the Poor of the City of NewYork established a free church in African-American Bancker Street—the very “seat of Satan.” The

following year they planted another chapel on Allen Street, near Corlear’s Hook. The ladies retained

ministers to garrison these outposts but also took the field themselves, visiting the poor, praying with

them in their homes, and coaxing destitute mothers to church. Clerics found such female initiatives

alarming, and in 1821 the Rev. William Gray told the women that because they “had engaged in an

enterprise beyond your appropriate sphere,” active management had “been wholly transferred from

the hands of the Ladies into those of the Gentlemen.” Ministers applauded when the Presbyterian

Young Men’s Missionary Society of New York built a church near Corlear’s Hook and staffed it with

eager young preachers, and when the Presbyterian New-York Evangelical Missionary Society of

Young Men set up mission stations in the Hook and on Bancker Street, where they conducted

services, visited families, and held prayer meetings.

Like the SPP, evangelicals believed in “moral superintendence.” The Rev. Ward Stafford, Female

Missionary Society preacher-at-large, argued in his New Missionary Field (1817) that “the very sight

of the moral and pious is a check to the wicked.” Because New York wasn’t a “well-regulated

village,” where the “character, and circumstances of every family are almost necessarily known,” it

was imperative for godly men and women to make their presence felt, dispensing not charity but their

own righteousness. Stafford also accepted the reigning orthodoxy: “If people believe, that they shall

be relieved when in distress,” he asserted, “they will not generally make exertions, will not labour

when they are able and have the opportunity.” But “let it be known that death or extreme suffering

will be the consequence of idleness, or profligacy, and the number of the idle and the profligate will

soon be diminished.”

The urban mission movement expanded steadily in the next few years, with the waterfront and its

“vastly wicked” sailors drawing particular attention. Stafford helped organize both the New-York

Marine Missionary Society (1817) and the Port of New York Society for Promoting the Gospel

Among Seamen (1818). Together they erected the interdenominational Mariner’s Church (1819) on

Cherry Street near the East River docks. In 1821, even more aggressively, the New-York Bethel

Union began holding nightly prayer meetings aboard wharfed ships and in sailors’ boardinghouses

and offering comfort to families whose breadwinners had been lost at sea. In 1822 many of the new

missions came together in the United Domestic Missionary Society, which four years later took the

lead in founding the nationwide American Home Missionary Society.



SPREADING THE GOOD NEWS



In 1816 a group of prominent reformers—Henry Rutgers, David Low Dodge, Divie Bethune,

Gardiner Spring, Richard Varick, and Governor De Witt Clinton, among others—founded the

American Bible Society (ABS) for the purpose of printing and distributing Bibles throughout the

United States. New York was deemed the appropriate headquarters city for such an organization—

indeed, the ABS constitution required that twenty-four of its thirty-six managers reside in Manhattan

or vicinity—because of the advanced state of its printing industry. In particular, New York printers

had been the first in the country to adopt a revolutionary new British technique called stereotyping.

Formerly, a printer set a page by locking movable type into a form that would be disassembled

once the required number of impressions for a given press run had been taken. In stereotyping,

however, the printer made a mold of the page before disassembling the form, then cast a metal plate

that could be inserted in the press over and over again, whenever a new printing was wanted, so the

page would never have to be reset. (The plate was the stereotype itself, from the Greek stereo, or

solid; thus “stereotype” would come to mean any often-repeated concept or image.) It was an

expensive process but made good economic sense with books destined for massive and repeated print

runs. Not surprisingly, one of the first objectives of the ABS was to acquire a full set of “wellexecuted stereotype plates” of the Bible, and within a few years the presses in its sumptuous Nassau

Street headquarters, nicknamed Bible House, were producing tens of thousands of Bibles every year.

Completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 ensured that the reach of Bible House would extend into every

corner of the developing West.

Nor did the ABS neglect the widening war on irreligion in the city itself. It too believed that

pauperism could be defeated by the Word, and it helped organize an expanding network of local

groups—including the New-York Female Auxiliary Bible Society (1816), the Female Juvenile

Auxiliary Bible Society (1816), the New-York Union Bible Society (1816), the New-York African

Bible Society (1817), and the New York Marine Bible Society (1817)—whose members distributed

Bibles in slums, brothels, grogshops, gambling dens, hospitals, and jails. Sometimes they ran into

trouble. “A respectable man, not long since, who was distributing Bibles,” the Rev. Stafford reported

in 1817, “was attacked, knocked down, and had his clothes literally torn off, and was so beaten as to

lose considerable blood.” Sometimes they were laughed at by sailors brandishing books by “Hume,

Gibbon, Paine,” and other infidels. Nor did Jews appreciate being the target of conversion drives:

printer Solomon H. Jackson’s The Jen (1823-25), the first Jewish periodical published in the United

States, consisted mainly of monthly diatribes against Christian missionaries.

Their biggest problem, however, often proved to be the Bible itself—too big, too long, too

complex to be a convenient instrument of urban evangelism. Not so the pamphlets and booklets

distributed by the New York Religious Tract Society, founded back in 1807 by many of the same men

who subsequently created the American Bible Society. Initially, the Tract Society had been content

with British imports—such inspirational tales as “The Duties and Encouragements of the Poor,”

“Destructive Consequences of Dissipation and Luxury,” “Happy Poverty,” and the like—which it

forwarded in bulk to frontier missionaries. After 1815, however, it joined the evangelical crusade

against urban pauperism and gave rise to a pair of auxiliaries that dispensed tracts among the city’s

poor: the Young Men’s Tract Society (1821) and a special Female Branch (1822) organized by Mrs.

Divie Bethune (the former Joanna Graham), which enlisted the support of several hundred prominent

women.



In 1825 the New York Tract Society combined forces with the New England Tract Society to form

the American Tract Society (ATS). Like their counterparts in the ABS, the directors of the new group

readily agreed to set up headquarters in New York, knowing that the Erie Canal would ensure them

easy access to western settlements—and because the city was home to wealthy benefactors like

textile importer Arthur Tappan, banker Moses Allen, and merchants David Low Dodge, Anson

Phelps, and Thomas Stokes. Tappan and Allen paid for the construction of Tract House on Nassau

Street, which, like the ABS’s nearby Bible House, held the organization’s offices, foundry, bindery,

and stereotype-finishing functions. (The availability of stereotyping in Manhattan, the directors said,

had been “a powerful argument in favor of union.”) It was likewise Arthur Tappan’s gift of five

thousand dollars that led, in 1826, to the installation of New York’s first steam-powered press on the

fourth floor of Tract House. By 1829, four years before Harper Brothers became the first commercial

publisher to install one, the Tract Society had sixteen of the machines, all built by Robert Hoe, soon

the country’s leading manufacturer of printing presses.

The offspring of this marriage of technology and evangelism was an unprecedented outpouring of

printed matter—six million tracts (61 million pages in all) in 1829 alone, plus better than three

hundred thousand Bibles. No less impressive was the invention of marketing and distribution

techniques, later the norm in American business, by which the evangelicals moved their wares from

New York to the rest of the country. Corps of agents in every state, organized into hundreds of local

branches, handed out Bibles and tracts door to door, founded circulating libraries, advertised in

newspapers, and even made special deliveries to sailors and boatmen aboard whalers, packets,

ferries, canal barges, and steamboats. There was even a Tract of the Month program that offered

“book dividends” to subscribers.

In New York itself, the American Tract Society considered the systematic distribution of its

publications to be “the lever which shall move the foundation of Satan’s empire in this city” (and in

Brooklyn too, which got its own auxiliary Tract Society). In 1829 the ATS launched a “General

Supply” campaign whose goal was to place in the hands of every resident a copy of a different tract

every month. Each ward had a committee and a chairman and was divided into districts encompassing

sixty families each. Each district (over five hundred in all) was assigned a team of distributors who

received printed instruction cards, forms for reporting back to the central committee, and a supply of

the tract of the month. By March 1829 the ATS had visited all 28,771 families in the city. Only 388

declined to take a tract. Evidently, as the secretary of the ATS put it, “The concentration of tract work

in New York was what God designed.”

OFF TO SCHOOL



Complementing the labors of missionaries and tractarians came a new burst of interest in the use of

schools to combat pauperism and licentiousness: children who acquired good moral training at an

early age (it was said) would become productive, law-abiding, self-supporting adults. The difficulty

—as Eddy, Pintard, Clinton, and other reformers began to appreciate soon after the turn of the century

—was that New York still had no system of public education that could be mobilized to provide such

training to the people who needed it the most. Affluent residents sent their sons and daughters to

private day schools or boarding schools; artisans and journeymen, if they could afford it, relied on a

small number of “pay schools” that taught the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Some merchants and entrepreneurs had begun to experiment with educational institutions targeted

at specific elements of the laboring population. In 1820, for example, the Chamber of Commerce



established the Mercantile Library Association to impart commercial skills and sober habits to the

city’s growing number of clerks—too many of whom, surrounded by “excitements to pleasure,” had

“become the votaries of vice and depravity.” The association’s hope was that its mammoth book

collection (eventually comprising thirty-seven thousand volumes, second largest in town),

supplemented with regular lectures by leading business, professional, and public men, would help the

clerks resist “these moral foes.” That same year, prompted by John Pintard and the Society for the

Prevention of Pauperism, the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen—dominated by wealthy

former mechanics like bankers Jacob Lorillard and Stephen Allen—established an Apprentices

Library, a lecture series, and a school for the sons of poorer or deceased members. Their goal too

was to teach good habits and skills. In 1826 the General Society opened a school for girls as well.

For the vast majority of children, however, so-called charity schools remained the only chance for

an education. By 1825 city churches sponsored fourteen such schools, with a combined enrollment of

nearly thirty-four hundred pupils, virtually all from poor families. The African Free School, founded

by the Manumission Society in 1786, drew nearly nine hundred pupils in 1823—more than half the

African-American youths of school age in the city. Another eleven charity schools were operated by

the nondenominational Free School Society (FSS), which Eddy, Clinton, and other gentlemen had

founded back in 1805 to educate poor children “who do not belong to or are not provided for by any

religious society.” After 1815, against the background of mounting concern over pauperism and

lawlessness, the FSS strenuously promoted its Lancasterian approach to education—a combination of

Bible study, rote memorization, and rigorous discipline—as “the main instrument by which extreme

poverty & grovelling vice, & high-handed crime are to be banished from society.” In 1825 John

Griscom boasted that over the years some twenty thousand children, “taken from the most indigent

classes,” had passed through FSS schools.



First Infant School in Green Street New York, by Archibald Robertson, 0.1827.

Located in the basement of the Presbyterian Church on the corner of Canal and Green

streets, the school was run by the newly founded Infant School Society. Like many

“charity schools,” it used the monitorial system devised by the English reformer Joseph

Lancaster. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Edward W.C. Arnold, 1964.

The Edward W.C. Arnold Collection of New York Prints, Maps and Pictures)

More successful still were the scores of Sunday schools that sprang up in the city during the

twenties. The Sunday school movement, launched just after the turn of the century, really took off in

1816, when merchants Divie Bethune and Eleazer Lord founded the New York Sunday School Union.

The purpose of Sunday schools, said the union, was “to arrest the progress of vice and to promote the

moral and religious instruction of the depraved and uneducated part of the community.” Thousands of

students were quickly recruited by handbills offering an “education free of expense” and promising

that those who attended regularly, read their Bibles, and behaved well would be recommended for

admission to an FSS school. The two hundred-odd volun​teers who signed up as teachers (many, like

Melissa Phelps, from genteel families) were pointedly charged to help their pupils become honest

and useful citizens: “While you instill in their young minds the duty of contentment in the stations

allotted to them by Providence, you will of course embrace the occasion to point out to them the selfdegradation which attend idleness and vice; and the certain rewards which await industry and a

virtuous life.”

By 1823 better than seven thousand male and female students were attending seventy-four Sunday

schools in New York. Roughly a quarter of the pupils were African Americans—half of them adults,

women as well as men. The Episcopal Church refused to join the Sunday School Union but started its



own program, which over the next decade grew to some two dozen schools with a combined

enrollment of six thousand. The movement spread quickly to communities on the Long Island side of

the East River, and in 1829 the Kings County Sabbath School Society was formed to coordinate

Sunday school work in Flatbush, Flatlands, Gravesend, New Lots, Brooklyn, and Bushwick.

Memorization remained the technique of choice, and its results were toted up meticulously. (Some

students were paid for each verse memorized—with coupons redeemable in Bibles).

All of this convinced evangelicals that they were at last beginning to make some inroads on

pauperism and related social evils. Even “Bancker-Street Sabbath-breakers of the vilest class [i.e.,

blacks],” exulted Eleazer Lord, had become “decent in their dress, orderly in their behavior,

industrious in their calling, and punctual at school and church!” In 1829, to celebrate the “mighty

machinery of Sunday schools,” twelve thousand scholars were paraded down Broadway in orderly

rows to Battery Park, where they sang songs and heard congratulatory speeches.

But the apparent success of the Sunday School Union was clouded by an acrimonious fight over

public support among the city’s charity schools. Since 1812 the state government had provided

financial assistance to the charity schools (funneled through the Common Council after 1824) in

proportion to their enrollments. As the number and size of church-run schools increased, however, the

Free School Society’s share of the pie dwindled alarmingly, and it began to attack all aid to

“sectarian” schools as a violation of the separation of church and state. In 1825 the FSS called for the

creation of a single public school system, under its management, that would be open to all city

children, “not as a charity, but as a matter of common right.” New York, it declared, needed

classrooms where “the rich and the poor may meet together; where the wall of partition, which now

seems to be raised between them, may be removed; where kindlier feelings between the children of

these respective classes may be begotten; where the indigent may be excited to emulate the

cleanliness, decorum and mental improvement of those in better circumstances.” The Common

Council agreed and, despite bitter opposition, cut off aid to denominational schools. In 1826 the Free

School Society renamed itself the Public School Society, though it remained in fact a privately run

institution.

Over the next several years, although the society’s schools did manage to attract somewhat more

students from what it called “the middle walks of life,” the effectiveness of free common education as

a cure for pauperism and immorality remained largely hypothetical. New public schools were opened

only in neighborhoods of “a quiet and orderly cast”—there were none in the Five Points throughout

the 1820s—and they tended to expel pupils who didn’t readily conform to their values. By 1829, of

the roughly forty-three thousand children in New York between the ages of five and fifteen, as many

as twenty thousand—overwhelmingly from the city’s most indigent households—still attended no

school whatever. Of the remainder, about fourteen thousand went to private schools, as against the

five thousand in public schools and the four thousand or so served by church-run charity schools

(which coped with the loss of public support by scaling back enrollments). Many working-class

youths withdrew once they were old enough to help support their families; few stayed past fourteen,

the traditional age for beginning an apprenticeship. What was more, the manifestly genteel and

Protestant leadership of the new system proved unattractive to Roman Catholics, who now began to

construct their own network of parochial schools.

Sunday schools reacted to the new climate by cutting back on the three R’s and giving more

emphasis to formal religious instruction, the effect of which was to discourage enrollment outside

their own congregations—most notably by African-American adults. Although the Manumission



Society expanded the number of African Free Schools from two to seven, the Public School Society

absorbed them all in 1834. Renamed Colored Free Schools, they experienced a precipitous decline in

quality that soon drove away many students.

JUVENILE DELINQUENTS



With only half of the city’s children in school and the old apprenticeship system in disarray, it was

almost inevitable that thousands of ragamuffins would become a fixture of the city scene—lolling

along the wharves, begging on the streets, thronging the shipyards, hanging about Brooklyn ropewalks

on the Sabbath, playing cards and spouting profanity. Some edged into criminality. Groups of girls

stole sugar, coffee, or tea from the docks and sold them to market women. Boys pilfered brass rods,

rope, or sheets of copper and sold them to junk dealers. Marauding bands robbed grocery stores and

vandalized houses. Boys became accomplished pickpockets. Girls as young as twelve drifted in and

out of prostitution.

The conventional response to errant or merely “vagrant” children was to put them in jail, but

chaplain John Stanford began to argue as early as 1815 that incarcerating youthful offenders with

adult criminals merely trained a new generation of professional outlaws. Stanford thought that these

children should be placed in an “Asylum for Vagrant Youth” where they could be instructed in moral

and religious principles and apprenticed to a trade. Stanford’s idea languished until the Society for

the Prevention of Pauperism fastened on the notion that wayward youths formed the true “core of

pauperism.” In the fall of 1819, just back from one of his visits with British reformers, John Griscom

spoke to a packed City Hotel meeting about the work with delinquent children currently underway in

London. Over the next several years the SPP became so enthusiastic about the youth-oriented solution

to poverty that in 1823 it reconstituted itself as the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile

Delinquents. Convinced that they could smother pauperism in its cradle, the society’s spokesmen

lobbied city and state officials to incorporate and fund the country’s first juvenile reformatory.

The New York House of Refuge opened on January 1, 1825, in an abandoned federal arsenal on

the Bloomingdale Road between 22nd and 23rd streets, amid farms and orchards on the outskirts of

town. The Refuge’s charges were children under sixteen, committed by the courts for indefinite terms

(not to exceed the age of twenty-one for boys or eighteen for girls). Their “indolent and worthless”

parents, in the Rev. Stan​ford’s phrase, had allowed them to roam the streets, frequenting theaters and

taverns until ensnared by alcohol, immorality, and crime. Stanford didn’t believe that they were

beyond redemption, on the other hand, for as the directors of the Refuge put it, it was necessary only

to put them through “a vigorous course of moral and corporal discipline” to make them “able and

obedient.”

Upon entering the Refuge, accordingly, the children were stripped and washed and given uniforms,

their hair was cut to a standard length, and they were placed in windowless five-by-eight-foot cells.

Day after day they followed the same lockstep routine, parsed by bells. Bells rang at sunrise and

fifteen minutes later, when guards unlocked their cells. Bells herded them to the washroom, to the

chapel, to school, and to breakfast by 7:00 A.M. They worked from 7:30 till noon (boys making brass

nails or cane seats; girls washing, cooking, or mending clothes), when bells called them again to the

dining room for dinner. Back-to-work bells sounded at 1:00 P.M., wash-and-eat bells at 5:00, work

bells again at 5:30, school bells at 8:00. Bells summoned everyone to evening prayers, then for the

march back to the cells, where absolute silence was enforced all night.



But Joseph Curtis, the Refuge’s first manager—chosen for his experience in superintending

workers at James Allaire’s ironworks—soon discovered that the young reprobates had minds of their

own. They used “improper language,” talked during silent periods, played during work sessions, and

ran away. When reprimands proved useless, Curtis resolved to be “as harsh as any other father.” The

infractions and punishments recorded in his daily journal for 1825-26 included:

E. D. paddled, with his feet tied to one side of a barrel, his hands to the other.

J. M. . . . neglects her work for play in the yard, leg iron and confined to House.

Joseph R.: Disregarded order to stop speaking, given a bit of the cat [i.e., the whip].

John B.: A few strokes of the cat to help him remember that he must not speak when confined to

a prison cell.

Ann M.: Refractory, does not bend to punishment, put in solitary.

William C.: Questioned guard’s authority, whipped.

Amid some uneasiness at his methods on the part of the overseers, Curtis was replaced by a new

manager, Nathaniel C. Hart. Hart proved an even more thoroughgoing disciplinarian, and he ringed

the Refuge with a two-foot-thick wall to prevent escapes. Nevertheless, the institution was

pronounced a great success. In its first ten years 1,120 boys and girls were admitted, and those

“reformed” to the satisfaction of the authorities were released to parents, friends, or masters for

apprenticeship; the more refractory were bound over to captains of whaling ships or sent into service

as domestics.

THE BELLEVUE INSTITUTION



Almost due east of the House of Refuge, on a twenty-six-acre site overlooking the East River, stood a

complex of buildings, likewise enclosed by a wall, known as the Bellevue Institution. Dedicated in

1816, by the mid-twenties Bellevue comprised—in addition to the pesthouse opened during the

yellow fever epidemic of 1794—the city’s new almshouse, Bellevue Hospital, and a penitentiary,

plus a school, a morgue, a bakehouse, a washhouse, a soap factory, a greenhouse, an icehouse, and a

shop for carpenters and blacksmiths. It was here that New York reformers faced, even more directly

than at the House of Refuge, the task of holding the line they had drawn between the deserving and

undeserving poor.

The three-story, blue stone almshouse paralleled the water; 325 feet long, with wings at either end,

it was the largest structure in the city. Nevertheless, within a decade of its opening, it was

overflowing with people too old, too young, or too sick to heed the summons to greater self-reliance.

During the year ending September 30, 1825, when the annual cost of running the almshouse had

climbed to $81,500—better than 10 percent of the total city budget of $780,400—the number of its

inmates fluctuated from a high of 1,867 to a low of 1437 (with deaths totaling 495). Ninety-five

percent of the inmates were white and were more or less equally divided between men and women



(with genders, like races, segregated in their own quarters). The number of those whom guidebook

writer James Hardie referred to as “wretched emigrants from Europe” had multiplied, but they were

still outnumbered, three to two, by “needy adventurers from most parts of our own country.”

Jews were conspicuously absent from the almshouse rolls as, ever since New Amsterdam had

made Jewish settlement contingent on their poor not becoming a burden to the Dutch West India

Company, the tiny community had been taking care of its own. Suddenly faced with large numbers of

poor immigrants in the 1820s, but determined that no Jew would beg on the streets, Shearith Israel

(spurred by its president Harmon Hendricks) dispensed aid to the needy. In 1822 Ashkenazic

members formed the Hebrew Benevolent Society, which affiliated with B’nai Jeshurun after it

seceded.

Catholics too formed their own institutions. In 1817 the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum was

founded by the Sisters of Charity, an out-of-town order organized by ex-New Yorker Elizabeth Ann

Seton (who in 1797 had cofounded the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows). In 1805, two years

after her husband died, Seton had converted to Catholicism and been baptized at St. Peter’s.

Ostracized by her Episcopalian family and friends, she had moved with her five children to Baltimore

in 1808, taken vows before the bishop, and formed the American Sisters of Charity in 1809 in

Emmitsburg, Maryland; it was the first Catholic religious order in the United States. Seton never

returned to New York, but four years before she died in 1821, she dispatched three sisters to open the

city’s first Catholic orphanage, a small wooden structure on Prince Street near the new cathedral. The

ranks of its charges grew steadily, swollen by the hard lives and piety of immigrants like Bridget

McGlone, who in 1820 left her infant daughter on the steps of Bishop Connolly’s house, with a note

saying she hadn’t taken it to the almshouse as she didn’t want it exposed to Protestant teachings. In

1826 the diocese erected a three-story brick building for the sisters’ now 150 orphans; a second

followed in 1830 for half orphans (children with one surviving parent).

Like the almshouse, the new Bellevue Hospital was soon overcrowded, thanks both to the

epidemics that swept the city in the early 1820s and to an influx of patients turned away from the New

York Hospital downtown. That old charitable establishment, though it still served the respectable

poor, had begun to exclude dangerous or morally reprehensible cases. It now sent the contagiously ill

up to Bellevue’s pesthouse, the chronically ill to Bellevue’s hospitals and infirmaries, and the wicked

ill—sailors with syphilis—to Bellevue’s almshouse, where they could be “made to work.” This

policy at once lowered the downtown institution’s patient load and diminished its mortality rate by

whisking away terminally ill patients before they could blemish the hospital’s good name.

The pressure on Bellevue Hospital and the almshouse was somewhat alleviated by the appearance

of specialized institutions for indigent New Yorkers of good character, among them the New York

Eye Infirmary (1820), the New York Infirmary for the Treatment of Diseases of the Lungs (1823), a

Deaf and Dumb Asylum (1817), and the New York Asylum for Lying-in Women (1823). Similarly, in

1821 “maniacs” and “lunatics” were shifted from city hospitals to the new Bloomingdale Insane

Asylum, located on a rustic seventy-seven-acre plot several miles north of town (now occupied by

Columbia University). Besides removing a source of constant disruption in the hospitals, its

construction was a victory for Eddy, who had been urging for years that New York adopt Europe’s

humane new system of “moral management” for mental illness, which all but eliminated chains and

straitjackets.

That both the almshouse and Bellevue Hospital ran out of room so quickly suggests the extent to



which genteel reformers had underestimated the population of deserving poor in the city. It was in the

penitentiary, moreover, where the consequences of their drawing such a thin line between pauperism

and criminality became increasingly apparent. The penitentiary, a three-story stone structure situated

just to the rear of the new almshouse, housed criminals and poor alike. It took those convicted at the

Court of Sessions of relatively minor offenses—petty larceny (theft of goods valued under twentyfive dollars), fraud, misdemeanors, disorderly conduct, assault—and set them to hard labor for terms

up to three years. It also received those convicted of vagrancy—the offense of being unemployed,

poor, and on the streets during one of the occasional sweeps by city marshals. These roundups came

at the behest of merchants and shopkeepers determined to improve New York’s business climate by

scouring away peddlers, scavengers, beggars, and potential criminals. In 1826 the 210 vagrants

(fiftynine white men, ninety-three white women, sixteen black men, forty-two black women)

substantially outnumbered the eighty-four criminals (fifty-two white men, two white women, twentyseven black men, three black women), in part because prostitutes were charged as vagrants.

Vagrants too were set to hard labor, for up to six months, which took various forms. Some

prisoners worked alongside almshouse inmates, making shoes or mending clothes, further blurring the

line between poverty and criminality. Others were set to opening and improving city streets. Still

others were assigned to the treadmill, or “stepping wheel,” another English import beloved by

reformers, which was installed at Bellevue in 1822 at the urging of Mayor Stephen Allen. Housed in

a two-story stone building erected for the purpose, the wheel was a cylinder, twenty feet long and six

feet in diameter, attached to a grain-grinding millstone. Sixteen prisoners would mount the wheel and

start it turning, trudge for eight minutes, then give way to another set of sixteen, their alternations

paced by the inevitable bell. Mayor Allen—who preferred the term “discipline mill”—applauded it

as a device for terrorizing “sturdy beggars,” those outside the walls as well as in.

New York City’s more serious offenders—those convicted of highway robbery, burglary, forgery,

counterfeiting, or rape—were subject to terms ranging from three to twenty-one years (arson and

murder were capital crimes). Such miscreants, overwhelmingly male, were sent not to Bellevue but to

the state-run Newgate Prison, hulking on the Hudson’s edge at Greenwich. By the 1820s, however,

Newgate’s viability was in serious question. Even dedicated supporters like Eddy conceded that the

old prison had been an almost total failure. The place was appallingly overcrowded, stuffed to twice

its capacity. After prisoners rioted in 1818, nearly destroying the jail, the legislature responded in

1819 by legalizing flogging—up to thirty-nine lashes per occasion—as well as reviving stocks and

irons. In prereform days, a thief would have been whipped and then set free; now he could be held for

years and flogged repeatedly if he didn’t conform to prison discipline.