“Come to Virtue ”: Institutional Responses to Poverty and Prostitution In Philadelphia 1800-1830

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A Thesis

Presented to The Faculty of the Department of History The Colorado College

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By Alexander Langstaff May 2014

Honor Code Upheld.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction & Social Control in Perspective 3 Chapter 2. Poverty in Philadelphia 13 Chapter 3. The Criminality of Deviance: Poverty and Prostitution as Vice 28 Chapter 4. Case Study: The Philadelphia Almshouse 40 Chapter 5. Case Study: The Magdalen Society of Philadelphia 52 Chapter 6. Concluding Reflections/Conclusion 82 Appendix 85 Bibliography 88

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Introduction

Amidst the folios of fraying papers marked with scribbled handwriting, ink blotches and mysterious notations for the Philadelphia Magdalen Society lies a mysterious white box in the grand reading room at the Historical Society of

Pennsylvania. Inside the box is a large brass seal; it is heavy to hold and slightly tarnished with wear, fitting perfectly into a small stamp machine beside it. The seal’s elegant craftsmanship shimmers in the dull reading room light despite its use and age. It reads, “Come to Virtue” and proudly identifies the Magdalen Society of Philadelphia as incorporated in 1802.1 Latent with symbolism, two Hellenistic figures act out a scene beneath these words that embody the prevailing narrative of redemptive moral reform: a sagacious man beckons the other, female figure to a building identified as the “Asylum”.

This crying, hunched female confidante is the Magdalen that is to be redeemed- the embodiment of the modus vivendi underpinning the Magdalen Society’s fascinating existence as a 19th century reformatory organization. In contrast to her bearded advisor, one notices that the woman lies on the fringe of the image, beneath a dead, leafless tree: she appears a marginal figure in the shadow of the institution. The Magdalen Society was founded in 1800 to reform prostitutes but became historically important as the administrator of the nation’s first private asylum for rehabilitating ‘fallen women’ from

1807-1908. For the first quarter of the 19th century, it specifically sought to provide

“refuge and improvement of such Females as have been seduced from the paths of

Virtue, and who are desirous to return thereunto” in Philadelphia before its mission

1 See: Appendix 1

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changed to sheltering ‘wayward’ women. 2 The complex meanings behind ‘refuge’ and

‘improvement’ evident in the brass seal vignette constitute the subject of this thesis. A short walk from the asylum was Philadelphia’s public almshouse. Founded much earlier in the 18th century, it catered to the “reception of the poor”3 Both institutions aspired to bring marginal groups of society “to virtue” but did so in extremely different ways with equally varying degrees of success.

I seek to compare poverty and prostitution as theoretical and institutional corollaries of early 19th century urban society. The underlying intention of this comparison is to relate poverty and prostitution as separate, but concurrent, categories of immorality in the early American consciousness. In doing so, I will explore three central questions: i) How were varieties of social marginality framed in the antebellum city through philanthropic institutions? ; ii) Is the historiographical social control thesis for institutional ‘containment’ of societal deviants consistent with the experiences of those within such institutions?; and, iii) How successful were private and public institutions in their reformatory aspirations during the early national period? In comparing and contrasting poverty and prostitution in Philadelphia as a heuristic foil for these questions,

I will concentrate on welfare institutions, for their prerogative was articulating and actualizing these categories into reformatory principles of normalcy. To this end, I hope to demystify the intentions and outcomes of the early urban institutional experience by

2 Magdalen Society of Philadelphia{henceforth MSP}, Minutes of Annual Meetings {henceforth AM}, Vol. 1, August 7th 1808. 3 Rules and Regulations for the Internal Government of the Almshouse and House of Employment (Philadelphia: Thomas T. Stiles, 1816), 2.

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considering the Magdalen Society and the city almshouse in their period of formative antebellum development.

The Magdalen Society’s asylum and Guardian of the Poor’s almshouse that form the basis of this study were the melting pot for discussions and debates about social marginality in the early 19th century.4 They represented the semi-private, semi-public stage upon which prevailing opinions and new social heterogeneities were performers.

One of the underlying premises in institutional historiography is that an institution is a mirror to the society it is located in and thus, is an important signifier of social attitudes.

It has been forcefully argued by Bill Luckin that “an idiosyncratic perspective from within a single institution provides concrete illustrations of such an ideology actually at work”5 Responding to the historiographical push for uncovering "inter-institutional pathways…{and} the biographies of inmates and patients” this thesis will concentrate upon the experience of those inside the Philadelphia almshouse and the Magdalen Society as much as extant primary sources allow.

4 A modern equivalent of the Magdalen ‘asylum’ would be referred to as a ‘half-way house’ today but the quasi-secular, deinstitutionalized meaning this label carries bares little resemblance to the very different world the Magdalen asylum operated in two centuries ago. The asylum has limited associations within the popular imagination as a psychiatric institution, but is, and was, a much broader term. In fact, it is still defined in dictionaries as “a safe or inviolable place of refuge”{Collins English Dictionary, 2003.} and a “secure retreat” {Webster’s College Dictionary, 2010}. Therefore, it will be referred to in this thesis by its own contemporary labeling as, ‘asylum’.

5Bill Luckin, “Towards a Social History of Institutionalization,” Social History 8 (1983): 91.

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The present study is focused on 1800-1830 because it constituted a seminal time for identity formation and institutional growth in Philadelphia and the wider republic.

The city’s population underwent consistent growth through this period: 1800 (81,009),

1810 (111,210), 1820 (135,637) and 1830 (188,797). Rapid immigration and an urban explosion led to demographic doubling in the 1840s.6 The fluid chaos of the 1840s and

1850s has been the subject of exceptionally intriguing studies on the violent contestation of urban identities. 7 However, the antecedents of 19th century social conflict lie in the earlier epoch of 1800-1830, a fruitful period for inquiry into urban social geography. The prolonged economic depression that lasted from 1817-1822 and culminated in the 1819 panic brought a re-evaluation of poor relief and institutional responses to poverty and prostitution. This pivotal period in modern America witnessed deep social self- awareness, swift socioeconomic growth and, the “discovery of the asylum”. 8

w ‘Mind the Gap’

In addition to these quite specific developments centered around the 1820s, the important Weberian idea of Western society’s transformation from personal to impersonal ties (viz. Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft) established the dominate historical

6 The population rose to 258, 037 in 1840 and then to 408,762 in 1850. US census data, as collated from: Fredric Miller, “Introduction” In Invisible Philadelphia: Community Through Voluntary Organizations, edited by Jean Barth Toll and Mildred S. Gillam, (Philadelphia: Atwater Kent Museum, 1995), 7. 7 The fascinating narrative of immigration-related public violence and contestation of public space is well-covered by David Montgomery and Bruce Laurie. See: David Montgomery, "The shuttle and the cross: Weavers and artisans in the Kensington riots of 1844," Journal of Social History 5 (1972): 411-446. Also: Bruce Laurie, Working people of Philadelphia, 1800-1850, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).

8 David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum, (Transaction Publishers, 1971).

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narrative for framing the emergence of modern, industrial nation’s social development in the wider 19th century.9 The tendency of excessive periodization to leave little room for overlapping Gemeinschaft- Gesellschaft transformations undermines the complexity and simultaneity of historical developments. In attempting to recognize the contingency and cohabitation of both Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in society- rather than their separation- some brilliant scholars have failed to accommodate the interplay of the old and the new in antebellum America.10 The colossal periodization of social change in the may work for political, diplomatic and even economic history textbooks but it does not fit very neatly for American urban social history, especially when considering marginal social groups. With one chapter typically ending in the 1780s and the next beginning in the early Jacksonian 1820s, the resulting gaps in early 19th century historical narratives are problematic and a fuller picture of social change is needed.

w Structure

After briefly discussing the social control model and its problems forthwith, this study will consider how poverty was socially problematized in chapter 2 through a new

‘moral lens’ in early 19th century reform rhetoric. In chapter 3, attention will be paid to the shared characteristics of pauperism {viz. poor relief} and sexual deviance {viz. prostitution} and their change over time. The lived experiences of those residing in early

9 Morris Janowitz, "Sociological theory and social control," American Journal of sociology (1975): 85-86. For an example of the static transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft see: Richard D Brown, Modernization: The transformation of American life, 1600-1865, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976).

10 Such as Sam Bass Warner, The Private City: Philadelphia in three periods of its growth (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987).

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19th century reformatory institutions will be deconstructed in case studies of the

Philadelphia almshouse and the Magdalen asylum in Chapters 4 and 5, respectively.

Their experiences with the ‘moral lens’ and institutional reform were very different.

Furthermore, the validity of social control theory as a historical framework will be tested.

The institutional responses of the almshouse and asylum to poverty and sexual deviance will be juxtaposed with the contemporary sociopolitical theory of antebellum reform; the intention, a priori of any conclusion, being to make light of the difference between the theory and praxis that is frequently disregarded in grand narratives of institutional development.

More often than not, the contentious and widely published rhetoric of institutional reformers and counter-reformers did not translate into historical reality for the destitute and the ‘fallen’ seeking relief and refuge. The duality of theory and praxis in this thesis is not intended to assume an exclusively structuralist account of the vibrant and ever- shifting attitudes of the early 19th century. Rather, the theory, ideology and rhetoric of institutional administrators and social reformers will be compared with the experience of those institutionalized, with the intention of synthesizing an altogether different, third perspective of their interaction.

It can be argued that both progressivism and social control revisionism- the two opposing poles of historiography surrounding antebellum institutions- share a historical vision of change predominating over continuity for the almshouse and the reformatory asylum. Despite their theoretical differences regarding the intentions behind benevolence,

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they see a rupture in the late 18th and early 19th centuries occurring for social institutions and an ensuing period of divisive and significant reform. But before exploring the historical actualities of the almshouse and asylum, it is necessary to first consider the broad contours of social control theory and a few of its accompanying problems.

w Section II: Social Control In Perspective

Social Control might be adequately defined as “the purposive mechanism used to regulate the conduct of people who are seen as deviant, criminal, worrying or troublesome in some way by others”11 As a concept, it has been transplanted easily into historiography because it embodies the same type of causal enquiry that the historian engages in; he or she asks ‘why does this make sense for this time’, just as the sociologist asks ‘why does this make sense for this society’. However, social control theorists advance more than a polemical critique of social institutions and power structures. Social control is intended as a nuanced way to understand the conveyance of order and the

“conditions of existence” in a given society.12

Most historians of antebellum institutions operating within the social control framework believe that the “desire for social control and economy marched hand in hand with a humanitarian concern to aid the needy”. 13 Of the three strains of social control theory in current historical literature- Marxist, poststructuralist and neo-functionalist- the

11Martin Innes, Understanding social control: Crime and social order in late modernity, (McGraw-Hill International, 2003), 3. 12 Innes, Understanding social control, 6. 13 Alexander, John K. “Institutional Imperialism and the Sick Poor in Late Eighteenth Century Philadelphia: The House of Employment vs. The Pennsylvania Hospital.” Pennsylvania History. Vol. 51, No. 2 (1984): 101-117.

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third has dominated the most recent historiography of 19th century institutions. 14 Neo- functionalists seek to analyze society not in its parts but as a whole, with the desire to understand the causal relatedness of the wide historical structure. Emile Durkheim first pronounced a theory of control and deviance in terms of tension and instrumentality.

Spurred by advances in urban studies at University of Chicago in the 1920s, social theory became a meta-theory for identity construction and identity conflict. Following a lull of interest in functionalism, the notion that social control might actually produce deviance surfaced in the 1950s.

In the neo-functionalist subfield of ‘labeling theory’, Edwin Lemert reenergized discussion on social control by identifying the crucial difference between acting deviant and being identified or “labeled” as deviant. 15 Lemert and others recognized the transience of ‘deviance’ as a social identifier. Taking Lemert’s cue, historians sought to trace the causality not of deviance itself but rather, how certain people both came to be identified with deviance and were inculcated with generalized conceptions of deviance. 16

The neo-functionalist idea of social control flourished in institutional historiography and seemed to provide the elusive encryption for unlocking the enigma of institutional development. It was the central theme in David Rothman’s influential work, Discovery of the Asylum (1971), which stands as the classic statement of social control in 19th century

America.

14 See: Stanley Cohen and Andrew Scull, "Introduction: social control in History and Sociology," In Social Control and the State: Historical and Comparative Essays, (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983): 1-14. 15 See: Marshall, Helen, Kathy Douglas, and Desmond McDonnell. Deviance and Social Control: Who Rules?. Oxford University Press, 2007. 16David M. Downes and Paul Elliott Rock, Understanding deviance: A guide to the sociology of crime and rule-breaking, (Oxford University Press, 2011), 19.

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When considering how the social control framework applies to narratives of 19th century institutions, one encounters several theoretical problems. The grand theory of the

Marxist framework operates around the role of the state as a central character in historical development. However, public institutions (like the Philadelphia almshouse) and private institutions (like the Magdalen asylum) both exercised extensive autonomy from the weak antebellum state and were not configured around statist policies. When viewed through the prism of Marxist state-driven intervention, the immense set of parochial responses these institutions developed over time is neither historically understandable nor sufficiently acknowledged. The second, more complex issue of class in early 19th century

America further muddles the effective application of Marxist social control analysis.

Central to Marxist theories of hegemony is a militant bourgeoisie but the ambiguity of any middle class materialization in the early 19th century jeopardizes this logic.17

As regards neo-functionalists, some historians have raised alarm at the tendency to collectivize disparate institutions into simple narratives of malevolent reform. Among these so-called ‘progressivist’ critics, Gerald Grob has been the most articulate, arguing that the narrative of social control’s economy of power belies any deeper nuances

17 For a stimulating survey of the differing historiographical perspectives on tracing the birth of latent middle class consciousness in the antebellum era, see: Stuart Blumin, "The hypothesis of middle-class formation in nineteenth-century America: A critique and some proposals," The American Historical Review (1985): 299-338. For Philadelphia, see Jacquelyn C. Miller, "An" Uncommon Tranquility of Mind": Emotional Self-Control and the Construction of a Middle-Class Identity in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia," Journal of Social History (1996): 129-148. Miller argues that the city’s devastating Yellow Fever epidemics of the 1790s precipitated the emergence of a middle class value system through new social customs orientated against disorder and lower class suffering.

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regarding the evolution and growth of institutions vis-à-vis the challenges they faced. 18

Further criticism has pertained to the tendency of functionalist narratives to focus excessively on the controllers' motives rather than the impact of their efforts. 19 Michael

Ignatieff believes that these narratives run the risk of “imputing conspiratorial rationality to a ruling class” and “reducing institutional development to a formless ad hoc adjustment to contingent crisis”20 It is exceedingly difficult to prove the internalization of any type of hegemonic conformity in a historical individual’s motivations. Because of this, the neo-functionalist historians like David Rothman have often inferred the presence of such “conspiratorial rationality” in historical actors with scant evidence. v Summary

Social control, some have argued, is routinely used as a framework "without any analytical rigor" by historians.21 This brief survey of reflects the variety of fluid interpretations seeking to understand the ‘regulation’ of individuals. In the critical analysis of 19th century institutions and social interaction that will follow, social control will be primarily treated as the neo-functionalist conception. The prolific scholarship of historians in this school has been particularly focused on urban communities and associated closely with 19th century social development.

18Gerald Grob, “Reflections on the History of Social Policy in America,” Reviews in American History 7 (1979): 295. 19Lawrence Frederick Kohl, "The Concept of Social Control and the History of Jacksonian America," Journal of the Early Republic (1985): 21-34. (Pg 32) 20 Michael Ignatieff, "State, civil society, and total institutions: A critique of recent social histories of punishment," Crime and Justice (1981): 157.

21 Kohl, "The Concept of Social Control and the History of Jacksonian America,” 25.

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Chapter II: Poverty and the ‘Moral Lens’ in Philadelphia

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven” Matthew 5: 3, The New Testament

At the dawn of the 19th century, it was estimated that around 15% of

Philadelphia’s population were 'poor'.22 In reality, many more would have been considered penurious by today’s standards of socioeconomic security and comfort. The horrid condition of some of the poor in the city, such as one almshouse arrival who was

"naked, starved and {in a} ragged condition…running away with vermin", was truly shocking. 23 The city’s colonial configuration had intermixed the poor and the rich in the same space for a century but was in the process of giving way to segregation.24 The poor, the weak and the needy were being driven into designated communities that functioned as contained slums on Philadelphia’s outskirts, the “most offensive, unhealthy parts of the city.”25 There, in semi-cataclysmic scenes of “impure” air, “dead dogs, cats” and “ponds of stagnated water" they eked out a perilous existence from odd jobs and welfare.

The history of poverty in 19th century industrializing societies is ordinarily told through economic narratives of crowded labor markets and uneven growth. 26 However, the narrative of poverty induced by rapid industrialization extends beyond lower-class

22John K Alexander, Render them submissive: Responses to poverty in Philadelphia, 1760-1800 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 9. 23Billy G. Smith, and Cynthia Shelton, "The Daily Occurrence Docket of the Philadelphia Almshouse, 1800–1804" Pennsylvania History (1985): 190. 24 Laurie, Working people of Philadelphia, 10. 25 Alexander, Render Them Submissive, 21. 26 Katz, In the shadow of the poorhouse, 4. For a summary of early industrial transformation of labor and market forces, see: Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (Oxford University Press, 1992), 23-33.

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strife in antebellum America. The sudden market shocks of the 19th century economy hit all segments of society from clerks and lawyers to merchants and tradesmen. In a depression-themed Pennsylvania newspaper editorial, a concerned citizen writes that

“thousands on thousands are constantly roaming from street to street and from town to town," searching for employment.27 Poverty struck much deeper into the heart of middling society than one might think. In fact, income security actually statistically improved for basic laborers wage earners in Philadelphia from 1830 compared to 1790, despite the economic uncertainties and rapid industrialization that would have implied the contrary.28 Whilst an extremely severe socioeconomic widening of the rich and the poor was one of the hallmarks of the 19th century, this trend had already begun decades before.

Only about one in four taxpayers possessed taxable property valued at more than $50.00, and 58.4% of the taxable were listed as owning no real property in 1800. 29 The disparity of property rights reflects the small sector of stable society that existed in the pre-middle class topography of Philadelphia in the first quarter of the 19th century.

Given the heterogeneity of those who found their situation suddenly destitute, there was no precise or convenient definition of poverty in existence from 1800-1830. To

Christian organizers that constituted the larger part of benevolent enterprises, the ecumenical teachings of universality before God framed the poor as “neighbors” rather

27 Editorial, The Watchman. (Harrisburg, PA, July 31st 1841), 8. 28Donald R Adams, "Wage Rates in the Early National Period: Philadelphia, 1785–1830" The Journal of Economic History 28 (1968): 416-417.

29 Alexander, Render Them Submissive, 12.

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than outcasts. 30 With the tightly packed city grid of pre-1840s central Philadelphia, many of the destitute were really neighbors geographically as well. The poor’s situation was also praised as spiritually desirable by evangelical organizations because, they reasoned, although “extreme poverty may bring many trials, yet great riches bring many more.” 31

Poverty was normalized in other ways. It was argued by the fashionable economic liberalism of the day- subscribed to many reformers and policy-planners alike - that poverty was a “necessary and indispensable ingredient” to society. 32 Without it, there would be no incentive to work to generate wealth and industrial economy-based civilization would collapse. Related Malthusian ideas of population growth and resource scarcity also framed poverty as an essential condition of the status quo.

Clearing through the semantic ambiguity that hovered around poverty, an effort was underway by reformers to classify and rationalize the various underprivileged members of society into a neat scheme. The introduction of the recommendation system in the late 18th century had required alms applicants to supply references and imputed the poor with gradations of respectability, as judged by the quality and quantity of their supplied deference.33 This was partly prompted by the reevaluation of institutional effectiveness in poor relief. For decades, the institutional differentiation of paupers hinged upon a basic duality: those who were ‘deserving’ and those who were non-

30Bruce Dorsey, "City of brotherly love: religious benevolence, gender, and reform in Philadelphia, 1780-1844" (PhD dissertation, Brown University, 1993), 84. 31 Hartford Evangelical Tract Society, “Happy poverty, or The story of poor blind Ellen. A well authenticated narrative” (Hartford: Hudson, 1817): 9. 32 Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, New York, “Report to the Managers.” (New York: Clayton and Kingsland, 1819): 4-5. 33 Alexander, Render Them Submissive, 166-167.

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deserving of aid. By the 1820s, the poor were conceived of “as composites of different social characteristics who could, in fact, be classified, managed and rehabilitated according to their age, sex and ability to perform work.”34 The creation of new classes within the poor resulted in their internal stratification and fragmentation as a social group.

w Economic Troubles and Poor Relief

Of the economic shocks in the early 19th century that were linked to the rise of poverty, none was greater than the economic upheaval of 1817-1822. Culminating in the

Panic of 1819, this prolonged depression was the new republic’s first real taste of widespread scarceness and had a profound impact on restating a new conception of poverty that would last for decades. The crisis had begun when the trade embargo imposed by the War of 1812 had caused prices for goods to rise to new highs, hurting consumers and increasing the expenditures of charitable institutions' services, affecting the private benefactor and public taxpayer alike. Ironically, it was only after the lifting of the much-detested embargo that the financial system and consumer markets began to fully unravel. Domestic manufacturers that employed so many lower-class laborers had enjoyed extremely favorable circumstances during the embargo.

Following the return of foreign competition, domestic industry collapsed and the

American industrial bubble burst, leaving an extremely destabilized society in its wake.

34Gail E Farr, “Philadelphia Overseers of the Poor,” In Invisible Philadelphia: Community Through Voluntary Organizations, edited by Jean Barth Toll, (Philadelphia: Atwater Kent Museum, 1995), 282.

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Factories closed, vast business empires became worth nothing more than the paper they were printed on and the jobless filled towns and cities. One civic committee investigating the economy of Philadelphia reported that employment in thirty specialized industries of the city had fallen from 9672 to 2137 in just three years after 1816.35

The rising number of poor and unemployed combined with unrelenting fiscal pressure to place social welfare enterprises in a precarious position. Irritation with state

Poor Laws that sanctioned poor taxes had already crossed the Atlantic years before following British concern had arisen about the inefficacy of their similar policies of institutionalized charity during a similar time of domestic socioeconomic scarcity.36

Public scrutiny of the poor and poor relief intensified after 1819 as taxpayers logically sought to safeguard every penny from the clutches of unnecessary government expenditure.

Social minorities’ experiences with poor relief were particularly vulnerable to economic uncertainties of the period. Women were doubly hurt by their difficulty in securing any meaningful employment and, by the patriarchal conceptions of maternity and weakness that pervaded many institutions. Women’s standard jobs- cottage industry textiles, informal commission-based work ‘put out’, and cleaning and cooking - all paid little and had much less turnover than the seasonal employment opportunities men could

35 Samuel Rezneck, "The Depression of 1819-1822, A Social History," The American Historical Review 39 (1933): 31. 36 See: John Riddoch Poynter, Society and pauperism: English ideas on poor relief, 1795- 1834 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969). Especially pages xxiii- xxv for overview of British debate to rescind the Poor Laws.

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find. 37 Whilst journeymen faced poor job security, they were at least capable of making ends meet through odd tasks of laboring; gender norms that transcended class prevented women securing any such work. Added to this great labor inequality were the time constraints and fiscal responsibilities of raising families that plagued widowers and mothers of disappeared husbands.

The gravity of women’s preponderant exposure to these systemic hardships is reflected in the high numbers of women receiving relief. Priscilla Ferguson Clement estimates there were 17,497 recipients of welfare in 1830, of which 12,286 were women.

Clement's total estimates mean that over 1 in every 10 people of Philadelphia received private or public welfare in this period at some time. 38 Despite the clear disparity in female welfare relief, poverty was still seen as a “problem among men”39 Clement concedes that these her calculations are ambitious and must be taken with a grain of salt but they nonetheless offer a rigorously researched appraisal of relief showing that women received noticeably more aid than men and, that claiming welfare was a normal part of urban life for many in the city.

The situation for dark-skinned poor in Philadelphia during the depression and beyond was also severe. As the numbers of black city inhabitants ballooned- rising by

210% decade-on-decade increase in the 1800s- racial prejudice also increased in the city

37 Warner, The Private City, 75-6. 38Priscilla Ferguson Clement, "Nineteenth-Century Welfare Policy, Programs, and Poor Women," Feminist Studies (1992): 38. 39 Dorsey, City of brotherly love, 136.

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amid the unstable environment of abolitionist tensions.40 While some polities like Boston were openly proud that they made “no distinction between white and black” in distributing poor relief, discriminatory biases dripped into poor relief institutions across the Mid-Atlantic. They faced economic and social pressures that compelled them to bow to populist dictums of race and morality.41 From 1817, the Philadelphia Guardians of the

Poor barred outdoor aid to most black Philadelphians. One decade later, black citizens accounted for only 3.7% of total outdoor relief recipients though they represented a far larger proportion of the city’s lower class.42 The depression increased the number of indigent Africa-Americans at the same time that public welfare opportunities afforded to them were shut off.

There was a belief among many ordinary Americans that those who did not work chose not to work and poor relief only rewarded them for this. This simple idea festered in the uncomfortable climate of economic depression. Alexis de Tocqueville captured the prevailing mood well when he argued: “Any measure which establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives it an administrative form thereby creates an idle and lazy class, living at the expense of the industrial and working class.” 43 Poor relief's apparent support for the idle and the lazy became an untenable position amidst the spending cuts and economic turmoil engulfing the fledgling republic, flying in the face of this infectious

40Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840 (Harvard University Press, 1988), 137. 41 Miscellaneous Remarks on the Police of Boston (Boston: Buckingham: 1814): 7. 42 Nash, Forging Freedom, 272. 43Alexis de Tocqueville, Memoir on pauperism (Trans. Seymour Drescher, ed. Gertrud Himmelfarb, London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit, 1997), 30.

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idea.44 In 1817, the Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Public Economy published a critical report of poor relief in the city. The long investigation had been prompted by the rising level of unemployment, which had placed a strain on the city as the ranks of the indigent swelled. The repot found that the causes of poverty could be traced to the intemperate behavior of the poor and recommended limiting outdoor, direct relief. There was a growing suspicion of the entire almsgiving enterprise.

Furthermore, the perceived rise in expenditures for poverty relief was attributed to the immoral character of the poor and the incompetency of state officials, rather than the actual increase of those who were poor. In the historical narrative of "repression" and

"punishment", the poor were held accountable for the "improvidence" of the economic depression and denied all open channels to relief except through confinement in the stricter, harsher alms houses.45 The debate over how to reform poor relief came to pivot on whether public or private institutions were more effective. Within the spectrum of poverty relief there existed a considerable dichotomy between private and public almsgiving. The former had the inherent virtue of not being a tax-funded enterprise mandated by Poor Laws and thus was attractive, particularly to the growing middle class of urban centers. Their resentment at having ‘foot the bill’ was founded upon a perceived ideological incompatibility of state social welfare with the rigorously individualist and self-sufficient liberalism that promised their dreams.

44Priscilla Ferguson Clement, "The Philadelphia Welfare Crisis of the 1820s," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (1981): 155. 45 Ibid, 164.

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w The Morality of Poverty

The Panic of 1819 marked a central point in the resurgence of a moral society in

19th century cities. For many, if not most, the question soon became, 'who was to blame'?

First in line were the handful of large, chartered banks that were flush with capital and aggressive in their foreclosure of debts. In terms that seem highly reminiscent of the recent 2008 financial crisis, these large banks had allegedly supported the reckless speculative investing of an elite few through untenable loans that had then over-leveraged the capital markets. However, many sought other reasons to account for their general malaise in lieu of recognizing the structural flaws of the system and they found these in the moral universe of 'character'. The nascent 19th-century fixation on the character of society and one's fellow man served as an attractive foil to accounting for this crisis, for it was a culture of excess and immorality, it was argued, that had overgrown and eclipsed the authentic and deeply-American protestant ethic of hard work and industry. The "spirit of extravagance", embodied in visions of New York oyster bars and flights of fancy, was associated with the danger of cities and, the growth of vice and licentiousness within them, more specifically.46 Thus, what had originated as an indictment of rampant economic liberalization and debt-funded growth became a moral parable for the new decade of the 1820s.

46 Rezneck, "The Depression of 1819-1822,” 37.

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There was boundless fear that a "moral plague" was spreading through society. 47

A moral crusade that had gained steam in the 1780s erupted into a full-out assault on the immoral, lazy and insidiously degenerate ‘character’ of the poor. One might have found an ethical silver-lining in the increased agency that seemed to be accrued to the poor’s supposed decision to remain unemployed, if it were not for the deterministic way that the same polemicists harangued their “improvident” behavior on a lack of virtue and gross impiety. Connections made between immorality, indolence and poverty helped to explain the chronic unemployment of so many of the city’s ‘wandering’ inhabitants.48 Honesty, humbleness and thrift were the virtuous values that the ranks of poor supposedly neglected but to which they were implored to enact in the “spirit of industry”. Moralizing poverty thus transformed it from a largely economic classification to a social threat and heralded the new character of the ‘marginal’.

Poor relief organizations believed that “intemperance, ignorance, and idleness” were “the prolific parents of pauperism”49 These three components of the poor must be carefully considered in order to understand how one saw of the poor when they looked through the new moral lens of the period. Idleness, perhaps second only to intemperance, constituted one of the major casual explanations for pauperism as well as characterizing the behavior of the poor themselves. It fuelled imaginings of the poor as slovenly and

47 Pennsylvanian Society for Discouraging the Use of Ardent Spirits, Circular, (Philadelphia: John Clarke, 1828), 2. 48Alexander, Render Them Submissive, 53. 49 Society for the Prevention of Pauperism in the City of New York {henceforth SPNYC}, “Documents Relative to Saving Banks, Intemperance and Lotteries” (New York: E. Conrad: 1819), 21.

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lazy and fitted with the vogue of the self-made man idea50. The centrality of idleness to the image of the immoral poor was directly responsible for the institutional focus on manufacturing and productivity. The almshouse and the Magdalen society were partly designed to inculcate values of industry that would transform individuals into self- sustaining members of society. So dangerous were the “idle” that the Philadelphia City

Council even discussed monitoring them through clandestine machinations.51

Interestingly, Frederick Kohl views the institutional ethic of self-reliance that was at the pedagogical forefront of reformatory institutions as something that was constructive and valuable.52 Rather than a mechanism of moral control, Kohl, believes that it embodied the

Jacksonian philosophy of autonomy and was about the "nurturing of personal independence". Nonetheless, the emphasis on self-help and rehabilitation for the indigent poor dominated the philanthropic ideology of most public institutions during the early

19th century.

Ignorance constituted another important supposed moral characteristic of the poor; it carried especially religious connotations of poverty as attributable to impiety and unfamiliarity with scripture. Perhaps the least articulated of the three moral components of poverty, it also referred to the rampant and secular problems of illiteracy and poor education. The pedagogical and proselytizing component of public welfare and private benevolent institutions focused on combatting the poor’s social illiteracy.

50Merle Curti, "Tradition and innovation in American philanthropy," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 105 (1961): 147. 51Susan G Davis, Parades and power: Street theatre in nineteenth-century Philadelphia, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 32. 52 Kohl, Lawrence Frederick. "The Concept of Social Control and the History of Jacksonian America." Journal of the Early Republic (1985): 21-34. (Pg 25) (31-32)

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It was, however, intemperance that was routinely identified by charitable organizations as the greatest important source of poverty as well as the rise of pauperism.

Most concerns focused on alcoholism and represented the precursor to the ‘temperance movement’ for a dry America. In New York, it was estimated that $1,642,500 was spent on alcohol each year through the city’s 1445 licensed liquor vendors.53 Members of the

Society for the Prevention of Pauperism identified “West India rum, home-made rum, whiskey and apple-brandy” as the most popular spirits among the destitute. It was

“laboring people” –masons, bricklayers and mechanics- as well as grocers and shopkeepers, who constituted the social sector “most in the habit” of drinking.54 More than a penchant simply for strong liquors, the ‘intemperate’ were those who showed immoderation in their lives, such as those who married recklessly and could not support their families.55 Intemperance and poverty were synonymous with each other and institutional responses became orientated to inculcating greater frugality and restraint.

The new vision of the ‘wretched’ poor was a product of new ways in which poverty became moralized and imbued with a set of artificially constructed moral normativities: intemperance, ignorance, and idleness. Quakers were outliers in this trend

53 SPNYC, “Documents Relative to Saving Banks,” 18. 54 SPNYC, “Documents Relative to Saving Banks,” 19. It is interesting to note that the report draws such direct connections between specific occupations and alcoholism, crossing over a variety of subclass layers to include both masons’ assistants and store owners in the same degenerate group. The writers of this report and many other reformers in Philadelphia and elsewhere saw occupations in the dawning industrial age of urban America as the prerequisite social signifier for such moral vices as intemperance/etc. 55Benjamin Joseph Klebaner, Public Poor Relief in America, 1790-1860, (New York: Arno Press, 1976), 10.

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and their belief that poverty was “a misfortune, not a punishment for sins” influenced the unique character of the Magdalen Society and other private organizations in

Philadelphia.56 However, for most of urban society, the three I’s constituted the supposed origins of pauperism, deriving legitimacy from secular and religious sources. As many began to see “true benevolence” as more “closely concerned in the mental welfare of mankind, than in their bodily concerns”, institutional responses to poverty shifted from concern on material relief in the form of clothing and food to moral rehabilitation.57 As well as framing the poor in a new way, they shaped the moral fabric of philanthropic institutions’ relationship with their marginalized supplicants. One example of the moral transformation occurring within institutions was the seemingly innocuous innovation of the Savings Society.

The Savings Society was initially founded with the practical and noble intention of hedging against higher fuel prices in winter by saving money to purchase large quantities of subsidized wood in the summer. One of the first in the nation, the

Philadelphia Fuel Savings Society for the Poor’s stated goal was “to give the poor the honorable feeling that they support themselves and are independent”. 58 The institutional model became widespread following its success in garnering subscriptions. However, the other savings societies it spawned became focused on the moral education of the poor

56 Margaret Morris Haviland, "Beyond Women's Sphere: Young Quaker Women and the Veil of Charity in Philadelphia, 1790-1810," The William and Mary Quarterly 51 (1994): 423. 57 Anonymous, “The Philanthropist: Or Institutions of Benevolence. By a Pennsylvanian,” (Philadelphia: Isaac Peirce, 1813), 43. 58 Philadelphia Fuel Savings Society for the Poor, “Plan of the Fuel Savings Society,” Philadelphia: Joseph Rakestraw, 1821.

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rather than their immediate welfare. Wrapped-up in the innocent economic virtue of saving was a deeper notion of a “moral collateral tendency”. Saving Societies admonished their prospective members to avoid “foolish trifles” and unnecessary expenditures, echoing the ideas of self-denial and control that were so important to the new moral ideal of temperance. The Societies were also lauded for teaching against adventurism, bringing “a habit of care and economy in the other sex” and even raising a

“barrier against imprudent marriage” all through the act of saving one’s shilling each week.59 Viewed through a lens of social control, the Saving Society’s prudence can be construed as apart of the aforementioned assault on immoral ignorance of the poor through new ‘habits’.

Savings Banks then, first appearing as fairly innocuous financial institutions, actually contained a nexus of broader reformatory impulses. Furthermore, they were one of many institutions whose priorities shifted from material philanthropy to moral pedagogy. The institutional transformation of the Saving Society represents a microcosm of the newly moralized ethical tripartite of poverty. Beyond the simple pleasures of compound interest lay a changed man, a new wife and a future of comfort and middle class prosperity. The presence of exhortations to combat ignorance, intemperance and indolence through pecuniary habit were didactic mechanisms of a broader social narrative unfolding at the twilight of the republican early national period.

59 SPNYC, “Documents Relative to Saving Banks,” 15.

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v Summary

The crippling depression of 1817-1821 provided some of the impetus for a critical revision of poor relief. Economic hardships contributed to a Malthusian attitude shift that further categorized the poor into multiple stratifications and shaped the conservative doctrine of limited poor relief. However, the conflicting picture of poor relief expenditures and debt burden as well as the deep moralization of poverty stretching back decades into the second quarter of the 18th century suggest that the reasons for viewing the poor differently may be more complicated than cyclical economic reactionarianism.

Institutional responses became directed at the “moral welfare” of the poor. Idleness, intemperance and indolence had long existed as qualities of the indigent- pillars of pauperism in the prevailing consciousness- but they took a new urgency and foreboding in mainstream discussion. By generating a newly detailed moral spectrum for society, it became apparent one could understand, rank and control disparate social undesirables in periods of social instability.

The poor no longer seemed quite so suited to the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ anymore.

An attitude shift was palpable by the 1820s towards moralizing poverty in a negative light- as a deformity of the human condition rather than a virtuous sanctity. At the same juncture in the new republic and Philadelphia’s rapid development, economic strictures of the century’s first great depression prompted a revision of poor relief practices. In this wave of moralized antipathy to the poor, framed as marginal specters on early 19th century society's fringes and, far worse, as a tenuous demand on the economy, one can trace the founding of the pivotal association that would shape attitudes towards the poor for the duration of the 19th century: poverty as vice and pauperism as criminal.

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Chapter III: The Criminality of Deviance: Poverty and Prostitution as Vice

The increased ostracization of the underprivileged discussed in the last chapter, including the economic exclusion of women and African-Americans, may be understood as part of a wider process of marginalizing social deviants. The degree to which associations of deviance, immorality and marginality actually occurred is difficult to ascertain. Mapping the underground world of the antebellum city is not an easy or clean task. Statistically, criminality was linked with various social ‘others’ including immigrants and blacks, as it is today. In 1800, nearly 40% of those convicted in the mayor’s court of Philadelphia, which handled most criminal cases, were Irish-born and

28% were African-American.60 Whether this was partly because there was a higher propensity to arrest or convict minorities is unknown but the connection existed for all to see. Further, the specific degeneracy of dishonest wealth accrual through lawless activity was viewed as the preserve of the devious and indolent poor. The fact that more than

80% of criminal convictions in Philadelphia between 1794-1800 were on robbery charges does suggest there was truth to the connection between crime and poverty.61

Strong symbolic connections existed between poverty, vice and criminality within the contemporary cultural consciousness of antebellum Philadelphia. The idea of

“criminal indigence”, as distinguished from “innocent” poverty, was correlated to the belief that the city faced an impending epidemic of vice, in addition to the “moral

60 Alexander, Render Them Submissive, 79. 61 Ibid, 79.

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plague”.62 Alcohol, prostitution and gambling (frequently in the form of lottery tickets) were derided as making “the unfortunate person who had innocently or imprudently descended into indigence, sink still lower”.63 The trend in the 1820s towards generating complex normative classifications of the poor as a group attached a new sense of illicit moral deviance to those who supposedly ‘chose’ not to reform or improve their character.

The messy definitions for criminality changed considerably in the decades between the Early National and Jacksonian periods. Sociologists refer to the movement of symbols and value-systems as ‘shifting standards’. These often act on categories of deviance to leave them in flux rather than as static, fully articulated and knowable conditions.64 The sick, the "afflicted " and the socially deviant were lumped into the same class as the immoral poor; of the socially deviant, prostitutes were most prominent.

Sexuality was tied to piety and purity. In the early 19th century, there was a loss of womanhood without these attributes.65 However, there was a fundamental hypocrisy between the narrative of criminal seduction and the reality of widespread licentiousness.

The fact that at least 1 in every 10 Philadelphians parented an illegitimate child at some

62 SPNYC, “Report to the Managers,” (New York: Clayton and Kingsland: 1819), 6. It is interesting to speculate about the origin of the frequent biological references in social discourse, i.e. the city being ‘infected’ and ‘polluted’ by a ‘plague’ and ‘torrent’. In the case of Philadelphia, one might draw some connection between the city’s catastrophic and generation-defining yellow fever epidemic of the 1790s and this biological rhetoric years later. The growing popularity of social Darwinism also infused 19th century social commentary with a positivistic and scientifically inclined tone. 63 Ibid, 6. 64 Downes and Rock, Understanding deviance, 4. 65 See: Barbara Welter, "The cult of true womanhood: 1820-186," American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151-174.

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point in the 1790s, according to city records, reflects the sexual fluidity of the early period.66

The ‘seduction narrative’, a trope of 18th century culture, was often used to explain sexual deviancy.67 The narrative was simple and very formulaic: a virtuous and innocent young woman was “robbed of their innocence” by a devious man and “sunk in wretchedness and guilt”.68 The ‘fallen’ women of the Magdalen Society and beyond were presented in the early 19th century as figures of victimization, seduced by the “artifices of wicked and abandoned men".69 Furthermore, it was generally presumed that illicit sexual activity was the result of male command rather than any female preference.70

The stigma of sexual deviance was most visibly manifest through sexually transmitted diseases. Because the disease could go into remission and then reappear, many infected women were incorrectly perceived as returning to their sinful ways and unjustly shunned.71 Asylum administrators visited the city almshouse to check-up on several Magdalens recovering their from illness and noticed that they were housed “in the apartments appropriated to Syphilitics patients” whereupon Magdalens were “exposed to the society and hourly intercourse of women of depraved conduct…."72 This prompted the managers to construct their own infirmary at the asylum in 1819. Sufferers of

66 Lyons, Sex among the rabble, 192. 67 See: Rodney Hessinger, "Victim of Seduction or Vicious Woman?: Conceptions of the Prostitute at the Philadelphia Magdalen Society, 1800-1850," Pennsylvania History (1999): 201-222. 68 MSP, BoM Vol. 1, undated (est. 1803?). 69 MSP, AM Vol. 1, February 1st 1803. 70 Riegel, "Changing American attitudes toward prostitution,” 441. 71 Clare A Lyons, Sex among the rabble: an intimate history of gender & power in the age of revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830 (UNC Press Books, 2006), 326. 72 MSP, BoM Vol. 3, March 9th 1819.

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venereal disease, like the poor, were stigmatized individuals in the structuring of the almshouse operation and wider society. Venereal disease carried the visible disgrace of sexual deviance and may explain why the almshouse record keeper frequently dispensed with little biographical details of women suffering from such illnesses in his entries. The

“apartments” the Magdalen board members speak of were referred to as the "polishing room" by almshouse staff. It was here that the weak Magdalens transferees were placed with syphilitics, the former being identified by staff with the latter as sharing the same character of sinful, ‘fallen women’.

Related to this, the Philadelphia almshouse records show a strong connection between poverty and prostitution in the life of the city. Seventeen year old Sarah

Ferguson was to the almshouse admitted as a “wanderer through the streets, having no place wherewith to lay her head, by which means she has been exposed to ever vile temptations being thus situated".73 The death of both of teenage Sarah’s parents and her subsequent recourse to prostitution for survival represents the streetwalker’s horribly common tale of homelessness and sexual vagrancy. Studies in modern criminology show that poor women- and men- represent some of the most frequently sexually trafficked members of society.74 This was evidently the case in the early 19th century as well and there appears to have been great intersectionality of paupers and sick prostitutes; not only

73Billy Smith, “The Institutional Docket: The Almshouse Daily Occurrence Docket,” in Life in early Philadelphia: documents from the Revolutionary and early national periods edited by Billy Gordon Smith (University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 1995), 41-42. 74 See Siddartha Kara’s superb and innovative three-part study, of which the third installment is forthcoming: Siddharth Kara, Sex trafficking: Inside the business of modern slavery, (Columbia University Press, 2009) and; Siddharth Kara, Bonded labor: tackling the system of slavery in South Asia, (Columbia University Press, 2012).

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did their social-constructed identities overlap but also the possibilities they faced in their lives as marginal figures of society.

w Sex in the City?

It is much more difficult to gauge the underlying character of prostitution than poverty for so little is known about the shadow economy, prostitutes’ daily lives and income, the nature of pimping and the general structuring of sexual commerce. There are few sources that offer figures for prostitution. One mid-century estimate from a crude gentlemen’s guide to Philadelphia’s brothels states that there were “ten thousand upwards” of sex workers in the city.75 For nearby New York, the guesstimates varied from 686 to 15,000 and reflected the highly irregular and unempirical approximations that came from police, aldermen, evangelical reformers and brothel guides.76

Despite the ambiguities regarding the scale of prostitution, the recent historiography of 19th century sexuality shows remarkable consensus in regarding the

1820 period as one of profound change in the expansion and scope of sexual commerce.

Before 1820, prostitution was on the "fringe" of many cities. 77 Though it was associated with other forms of marginality it endured through a double standard where it was both tolerated and besieged.78 Sexual activity existed but it was segregated in most cities to

75 Anonymous, “A Guide to the Stranger or Pocket Companion for the Fancy, containing A List of the Gay Houses and Ladies of Pleasure in the city of brotherly love and sisterly affection,” (Philadelphia: 1849), 1. 76 See Appendix 2 for table. 77 Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 26. 78 Robert E Riegel, "Changing American attitudes toward prostitution: 1800-1920," Journal of the History of Ideas (1968): 437-438.

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certain areas and out of the public eye. This was less of the case in Philadelphia, which had a vibrant sex industry. The city seems to have retained some of the revolution’s libertarian defense of individuality up to the 1820s and prostitution was not segregated.

Margaret Britton was arrested on one of Philadelphia’s busiest thoroughfares (Market

Street) for attempting "to have carnal intercourse…to get money"79 Her solicitation of market vendors from the country was in plain view of passers-by and she displayed little awareness of her complicity in any “fringe” activity.

However, as market forces increasingly commoditized sex in Philadelphia, New

York, Detroit, Baltimore and elsewhere, prostitution took on a new profitability and entered hitherto closed public areas like theaters and parlors across the country.80 The rise of ‘sexual consumerism’ was accompanied by a trend towards geographic segregation of brothels and sex commerce in certain ‘districts’ throughout cities in the United States during the 1830s.81 Sexual commerce did not become hidden; in Philadelphia, pimps could be seen “promenading…with the elite of the city” as late as the 1840s. 82

Nevertheless, the rise of commercial sex through the late 1820s and the big money it

79 G.S. Rowe and Billy Smith, “Prisoners: The Prisoners for Trial Docket and the Vagrancy Docket,” in Life in early Philadelphia: documents from the Revolutionary and early national periods edited by Billy Gordon Smith, (University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 1995), 83. 80 Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 313. 81 Marcia Roberta Carlisle, Prostitutes and their reformers in nineteenth century Philadelphia, (PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, 1982), 36. 82 Letter dated Philadelphia, August 3rd 1842, written by an anonymous Philadelphian ‘SNIP’ and published in the New York illicit newspaper “Flash” August 7th the same year. Extracted from: Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Horowitz, The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York, (University of Chicago Press, 2008): 176.

(Letter dated Philadelphia, August 3rd 1842, pg. 176 of Flash Press: Gilfoyle et al.)

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carried drew the notice of many and changed the place of prostitution in the city.

w Control of Prostitution

In the first quarter of the century, sexual offenses generally caused less municipal concern than gambling or drunkenness.83 The skepticism of some Philadelphia residents towards the recently opened Magdalen Society in 1802 rested on the idea that

Philadelphia was “too young and not so sunken in vice as to require such an institution".84 There was lackadaisical policing of prostitution in Philadelphia and elsewhere. From 1805-1814, there were only 220 offences of prostitution in Philadelphia; roughly a quarter of these charges were for ‘street prostitution’.85 Some women were undoubtedly charged with prostitution in Philadelphia County but, more often than not, they were listed on the Vagrancy Docket rather than the more serious Convict Docket.86

For example, Emilia Otter, "notorious prostitute" and Martha Patterson, a "common streetwalker", were charged as "disolute {sic.}” women.87

In contrast, the public’s reaction to prostitution and broader specter of vice was often vociferous. The social nuisance of sexual deviance, like poverty, was associated with public spaces, to the extant that it was ordinarily improper and questionable for women to be seen in public engagements unaccompanied. The early 19th century saw

83 Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between banners and ballots, 1825-1880, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 97

84 Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, January 23 1804. 85 Lyons, Sex among the rabble, 403. 86 G.S. Rowe and Billy Smith, “Prisoners: The Prisoners for Trial Docket,” 65. 87 Ibid, 79.

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several cycles of control of these spaces and the integrity of the city. The Philadelphia

Society for the Suppression of Vice and Immorality was founded in 1797 as a new type of vigilante group to wage war on the vice infecting the city. The Society was short-lived and faded away after several years of poor funding. 88 It was unable to articulate a clear mission and also suffered from the public’s lack of alarm about prostitution and other

‘tolerated’ vices.

Social control historiographers like Paul Boyer and John Alexander pay more attention to the later and less violent- though arguably more virulent- activities of the

‘moral crusaders’, first in the late 18th century, and then, in the 1830s throughout large cities. The Female Moral Reform Society and the New York Magdalen Society were the leading moral crusaders of New York City. They devised plans for monitoring urban public spaces that included recording the names of ‘johns’ that frequented brothels and publically shaming them in newspapers. All of these grand strategies to weed out immorality failed, though they stirred considerable public controversy and debate. Paul

Boyer believes that their ideas never came to fruition because of the strategies’

“impracticability” in the antebellum metropolis as “preurban” tools of social control.89

The practices of direct moral activism were too derivative of an outdated sense of local community to operate in the bustling city with any great success or find rapport with its inhabitants.

88 Alexander, Render Them Submissive, 82. 89Paul S Boyer, Urban masses and moral order in America, 1820-1920, (Harvard University Press, 1992), 20-21.The New York Magdalen Society was very different from its older namesake in Philadelphia. It was a proselytizing, highly political entity that sough to advocate for reform in the public arena. The New York Magdalen asylum, a converted boardinghouse with poor funding, was a failure and only open for several years until 1836.

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Around 1820, there seems to have been a change of attitude towards prostitution in antebellum cities. Women who deviated from the staunch narrative of “virtuous republican womanhood” were fancied deviant, especially throughout Philadelphia by the

1820s.90 The municipal government took a more active role in policing Philadelphia neighborhoods. The vigilante group phenomenon also resurfaced and took on a much more violent character than its benign predecessor half a century before. Groups would attack brothel owners, mistresses and destroy property with little regard for the law.91 The upsurge in violence towards individuals and institutions associated with prostitution, so- called ‘brothel riots’, was a product of the changed attitudes to prostitution and its economic success. Prior violence had existed in major urban communities but it shifted from being impersonal to personal, as individuals became legitimate targets in the eyes of working-class mobs.92 However, middle-class men also appear to have participated in vigilante groups, suggesting that there was more at stake than economic grievances.

During this period, men faced less culpability for immoral sexuality. This was partly because of the depraved debauchery of the ‘deviant’ women they consorted with who were now deviant. It was also because of contemporary men’s noveau masculinity, a cultural ideal that valorized the sundry escapades of the Jacksonian man in literature and

90 See: Clare Lyons, “Discipline, Sex, and the Republican Self,” in the Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, edited by Edward G. Gray and Jane Kamensky. (Oxford University Press, 2013), 91John C. Schneider, Detroit and the problem of order, 1830-1880: A geography of crime, riot, and policing, (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press), 1980, 30. 92 Timothy J Gilfoyle, "Strumpets and Misogynists: Brothel 'Riots' and the Transformation of Prostitution in Antebellum New York City," New York History 68 (1987): 57.

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popular discourse. 93 This new narrative pointed to the "unsuspecting, free and ardent" character of youthful men as a contributing factor and the subject of victimization;

‘Johns’ were victims that deviant women would "ensnare". These men became "ruined in pocket, in reputation, in health" and would “drag out a few misrule years of existence in a

Poor-House"- the most horrid of all emasculating eventualities to rub shoulders with the poor.94 There was thus a strong economic association between financial ruin and sexually licentious behavior for the young victim, much as gambling or excessive drink did in popular novels. This was all because deviant women presented more of an economic and social threat to society than they had done in the past.

Related to the growing hostility towards prostitution and the role-reversal of seduction narratives was a fundamentally new vision of sexuality. Clare Lyons argues that two ideas of ‘sexualities’ surfaced: the “virtuous women and virile men” and the

“lustful...rabble”. 95 Emerging in the 1830s through a decade of gestation in the 1820s, the new duality of sexuality was part of a social control programmatic, Lyons believes, to

“reinforce the boundaries delineating the social hierarchy and legitimate their economic and political dominance”. One possible explanation for the reconfiguration of sexuality as well as the socioeconomic heterogeneity of new vigilante groups was the developing problematization of sexual deviance as a class-based threat.

93 See: David G. Pugh, Sons of liberty: The masculine mind in nineteenth-century America, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983).

94 Friend of the Drama, “An enquiry into the condition and influence of the brothels in connection with the theatres of Philadelphia: Intended to awaken the attention of parents and guardians…” (Philadelphia, 1834), 5-6. 95 Lyons, Sex among the rabble, 310.

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Much as the poor had been classified to better control and order them, so too were prostitutes. Through the later half of the 1820s, social instability, normative femininity and class became synonymous as social signifiers of propriety; true womanhood was now the preserve of respectable middle and upper class women. 96 The lavish lifestyles of high-profile harlots like Helen Jewitt unsettled the middle and lower class reading public.

They were captivated and also horrified by the sensationalist stories of Jewitt and others contained in the budding ‘penny press’.97 Furthermore, there were now reified social hierarchies existing amongst prostitutes as well as between them and normative society.

The commercialization of prostitution in the 1820s had created a more horizontal and unequal community of sex spanning the lowest streetwalker to the most expensive madam in an intricately woven web.

v Summary

Poverty and prostitution were undoubtedly both perceived as increasing forms of marginality in the early 19th century. Given that the poor were institutionalized in

Philadelphia with greater vigor and reformatory zest at times when it appeared that they presented a threat to the city’s stability, was there a similar underlying sense of threat at the heart of this persecution and control? Like poverty, sexual vice was seen as a social threat to the stability of the city. However, whilst the Society for the Suppression of Vice

96 Ryan, Women in Public, 73. 97 See: Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett, (New York: Random House, 2010).

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and Immorality, the crusading reform organizations and the boisterous brothel riots all fought a fundamentally moral threat, they did so for very different reasons. Vigilante groups and brothel riots were intensely class-aware groups that sought to affirm their identity vis-à-vis socially marginal figures. In the 19th century, these groups coalesced around 1820 as the economic success of prominent brothel madams wrangled patriarchal nerves of working and middle class men during the economic depression. For their part, moral ‘crusaders’ in the 1830s were buoyed as much by evangelical self-promotion and theur desire for a “preurban” community as they were driven to fight immorality.

Partly as a consequence of the new ‘moral lens’ through which society’s margins were conceived, sexually deviant women were constructed as dangerous. Through a complicated process of cultural typification, individuals from disparate marginal groups of Philadelphia like prostitutes and paupers were aggregated together by stereotypes. This further reinforced the propensity of some to pursue socially deviant courses. The resulting association between poverty and sexual deviance- the poor and the prostituted- was therefore grounded in both belief and reality. As with poverty, there was a desire for stratification of the socially marginal communities through classification. However, prostitution was also reconfigured internally through the pressures of its own growing commercialization.

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Chapter IV: The Philadelphia Almshouse: a Case Study

“Only, alas! the poor, who had neither friends nor attendants, Crept away to die in the almshouse, home of the homeless.…” 98

The Philadelphia almshouse was intended as a place of last resort. Located on

Spruce Street, the almshouse contained multiple worlds of chaos, hardship and disorder.

It existed as a haven for the indigent, a laboratory for doctors and a prison for the restless.

Looking at the almshouse from the street, one would see tall, unattractive three and four story brick buildings that appeared as the 19th century equivalent of Corbusier-like brutalist tower blocks. Around the buildings was a large yard dotted with trees and encircled by a high fence 9-10ft tall.99 The building’s shuttered windows gave little away of what occurred inside.

The almshouse was an institution caught halfway between the aspiration of its supporters, seeking greater operational savings and more successful reformation of the poor at the same time.100 In the administration of the almshouse, Benjamin Klebaner writes, “cheapness and humanity were confounded".101 Through disassembling the experiences of residents’ daily life in this chapter, it is apparent that the almshouse existed as a failed organization that could benefit some residents and seriously harm others. The institution was also intensely dislocated from the ‘moral lens’ of reform ideology.

98 Henry Longfellow. “Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie” (1847). Extracted in: Thompson Westcott, The Historic Mansions and Buildings of Philadelphia: With Some Notice of Their Owners and Occupants, (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1877), 182. 99 See Appendix 3 100 Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum, 193. 101 See: Klebaner, Public Poor Relief in America.

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w Organization

The almshouse, along with the penitentiary, was conceived as the prototypical

Victorian ‘total institution’ that influenced modern prisons and hospitals. Among its multiple internal units were a bakery, jail, a school, chapel, an in-house apothecary and a laboratory.102 Accompanying these were carpenters, bakers, teachers, ironmongers, jailers, superintendents, surgeons, nurses, record keepers and midwives. It was a busy place and unique in the early 19th century for the number of professional and specialized staff it employed. Many of this diverse cast lived onsite, albeit in separate quarters, and worked to keep the sprawling institution running. In contrast to the single “keeper” of

New England almshouses, the Philadelphia almshouse had both a “matron and steward”, job titles identical to those of the Magdalen Society.

The almshouse was also the nerve center for poor relief enterprises in

Philadelphia, housing the expertise and resources employed by the Guardians of the Poor in their operations across the city. The organization was much bigger than the almshouse alone but all of its operational finances were routed through the institution’s accounting.

Just as the almshouse manufactory produced coffins for the burial of the Guardian’s non- institutional poor, other synergies existed between the institution and the organization as a central supplier and facilitator of many of its other projects.103

The Guardians oversaw all public poor relief in the city through the early 19th

102 Rules and Regulations, 1816, 23. 103 Guardians for the Relief and Employment of the Poor, “The Accounts of the Guardians of the Poor, 1803-1804,” (Philadelphia: John Geyer, 1804), 10.

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century. They gave out regular pension “allowances” to non-residents of the almshouse through the 18th and early 19th centuries, defying a legal admonishment by the city government. In fact, the outdoor relief budget was larger than all other institutional operations in the mid-1820s, including the almshouse. 104 Outdoor relief could include cash payments, clothing, food and fuel at the discretion of the visiting member from the

Guardians of the Poor. When the buildings became overcrowded, they would expand outdoor relief to compensate and this happened often. In 1831, there were more than

1600 residents in the almshouse even though it was intended to accommodate a fraction of that number. 105

w Residents

From 1800-1830, the demography of those who “resorted” to the almshouse was incredibly diverse. They included all ages, from 77 to newborn infants, many nationalities and crossed surprisingly vast class boundaries. It was also not uncommon for respectable working families to arrive in times of economic trouble or when a patriarch had deserted his dependents. In addition the almshouse proper, paying members of the public were also present in the infirmary receiving medical treatment.

Unsurprisingly, the winter months were the busiest in the almshouse. In 1817, the number of residents rose from 753 in July to 1203 in December, nearly doubling the demand on

104 In 1824 $631,000 was spent on outdoor vs. 470,000 on the city almshouse. Benjamin J. Klebaner, "The Home Relief Controversy in Philadelphia, 1782-1861," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (1954): 415. 105 Ibid, 416

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available resources.106 Epidemics that struck the city would precipitate large surges in admittance. In these times of hardship, children and women were the principal socioeconomically marginal and vulnerable constituencies of society that would frequent the almshouse.

In 1811, women claimed 86% of outdoor poor relief but made up only 30% of the almshouses during the same period. 107 For women, the almshouse offered some independence but it was a grim place. The aforementioned gender discrepancy has been attributed to the male-centered focus of public reformatory institutions.108 The almshouse also seems to have been unsafe for women. Sexual relations were prohibited but they often occurred. Robert Laughlin, one resident, was sent to prison for “fornication and adultery” with Catherine Jones, a “maniac in the house”.109 This case in particular is notable because it shows inter-racial sexual contact as well as the propensity for sexual abuse of vulnerable women in the almshouse.

For Children, housed in the same buildings as adults, the almshouse experience varied considerably by location and age. Like women, children were extremely exposed when family-support structures were subverted through alcohol, unemployment or estrangement. As they were too young to be “bound” into indentured service that supplied room and board, infants were at the mercy of the whims of relatives, neighbors

106 Guardians of the Poor, “The Accounts of the Guardians of the Poor, 1817-1818,” (Philadelphia, 1818). 107 Clement, "Nineteenth-Century Welfare Policy,” 135. 108 Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City, (Cornell University Press, 2002), 52. 109 Smith and Shelton, "The Daily Occurrence Docket”, 191.

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and city officials. In Massachusetts, the almshouse children were required to attend school from 8-11am and 2-5pm.110 They were taught reading, writing and arithmetic as useful skills for the outside world. In the Philadelphia almshouse, children were taught to read but spent most of their time in labor with tasks “suited to their strength and capacities”.111 The young age of those admitted is disturbing. Without any family or guardian, girls as young as 14 months old would enter the new life of the almshouse alone. There were not just children at the almshouse but also infants, mixed in the same institution as drunks and philanderers of all ages.

w Routine in the Reformatory

The quotidian experience for residents of the almshouse was structured around a new institutional philosophy of routinization. The day began, in the stipulated perfect model, with the sounding of the bell early upon which residents “must immediately rise, dress and wash themselves at the Pumps”.112 Breakfast and lunch lasted for thirty minutes; one would then “repair to their respective employments”. These were tasks appointed in advance by the “keeper”. This administrator also assigned mandatory seating for every meal in the large communal dining room for the residents. He was asked to make sure that they did not “immediately begin to eat” after a hard day of labor “but wait in silence” for the “pious and devout among them” to give thanks.113

On Sundays, the routine contained with every greater detail. All residents were to

110 Rules and Regulations for the Government of the Alms-House in Salem, (s.n., 1826). 111 Rules and Regulations, 1816, 10-11. 112 See: Rules for the Government of the Alms-House in Salem, (s.n., 1826). 113 Rules and Regulations, 1816, 7.

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“instantly rise” following the ringing of the morning bell and were to promptly attend

Service at the almshouse Chapel. Nobody was allowed to converse or recreate and the entire building would thus be in total silence. The consequences for “disturbing this day” were harsh and entirely at the discretion of the keeper. Sunday was meant to be a day of strict pious observances, when movement was exclusively directed by the ringing of the bell. Dinner was a full hour, measured by the all-powerful ring of the bell. The menu rotated between combinations of Pork, Salt Fish, and Beef with Vegetables on a weekly schedule with little surprise. Bread and Fish were occasioned for lunch. Finally, at nine in the summer and eight in the winter, the evening bell would be rung and all would “repair to their apartments, extinguish the lights, secure the fire and retire to bed”. 114

This routine was intended by idealistic reformers to control social deviants. It represented the reformatory capabilities of the almshouse as a place for teaching self- restraint and self-reliance through structure and order. However, the ideals behind this routine were seldom realized, as the almshouse existed as much more than a reformatory.

w The Laboratory

The almshouse was a pivotal arena for early medical science and was characterized by unregulated medicalization of many of its residents. For the sick, it often functioned as more of a laboratory than a refuge. Blockley almshouse, opened in 1834 as the city’s second alms property, became the Philadelphia Hospital following institutional consolidation. The doctors that practiced at the original city almshouse infirmary from

114 Rules and Regulations, 1816, 7.

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the late-18th century onwards conducted research on medical phenomena encountered in their visits that related to their own work. Elijah Griffiths, for example, researched the

“inflammation of the eyes” at the Philadelphia almshouse for completion of his doctorate of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania whilst serving as one of the institution’s medical consultants. 115 As “promoters of medical science”, physicians like Griffiths mixed their duty as doctors with their research endeavors in murky ways.116

The abundance of medical research carried out at the almshouse suggests that the medical presence at the institution was motivated by much more than the desire of civic virtue. With nearly 50 different medical conditions recorded at the almshouse in 1804 alone, the almshouse was a scientific treasure trove for research.117 Furthermore, there were more paged devoted in the Rules and Regulations to medical protocol than to the operation of the almshouse itself.118 The cross-purpose of medical philanthropy also served profitable pedagogical interests. Medical students were entitled to watch surgical operations, as well as witnessing labor and births, in the spectacle of the operating room

“by the purchase of tickets of admission”.119

Just as the unfettered experimentation on almshouse residents appears deeply troubling today, some in the 19th century saw it as similarly unethical. The Guardians of

115 See: Elijah Griffiths, “An Essay on Ophthalmia, or Inflammation of the Eyes,” (Philadelphia: High Maxwell, 1804). 116 Griffiths, “An Essay on Ophthalmia”, 3. 117 Guardians for the Relief and Employment of the Poor, “The Accounts of the Guardians of the Poor, 1803-1804,” 14-16. 118 See: Rules and Regulations, 1816. 119 Rules and Regulations, 1816, pp. 18 and 20.

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the Poor fought back against this imposed medical system in which, they believed, “the sickness and distresses of the poor were made a matter of gain to the professors attached to the medical schools”.120 The managers of Blockley almshouse also thought that innovations mandated by reformers in state government were made “to the total disregard of the feelings of the unfortunate inmates”.121 In the absence of any institutional code of ethics or patient’s rights, the Guardians argued that the insane would become

“merchandize for the professors”.122 There was thus tension between different reformatory components of the almshouse that caused rifts to open within the different moving parts of the ‘total institution’.

w Almshouse as prison

For the jail keepers and central administrators of the almshouse, discipline was essential. They attempted to create and govern their own environment of custodial life within the institution. A transitory “house of confinement” was introduced around the turn of the 18th century for all “vagrant”, non-residents of Philadelphia and “vicious” members of the almshouse, whereupon vagrants would be imprisoned for months until their subsequent admission until inspectors thought “a reformation has taken place”.123

These members of the poor were defined as paupers found “begging in the streets” and were labeled the most “destructive” and “idle” by institutional reformers who pushed for

120 Guardians of the Poor, “To the Senate and the House of Representatives of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” 3. 121 Ibid, 3. 122 Ibid, 4-5. 123 Committee to Digest a Plan for the More Effectual Relief of the Poor, “Plan for the government of the alms-house,” 16.

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their strict segregation and reform through confinement.124 Cut off from the “virtuous poor”, the almshouse experience for these men and women was very different and less pleasant than that encountered a matter of meters away within the same almshouse wall on Walnut Street.

Punishments for nonconformity were broad and went from denial of a meal to more draconian measures like wearing an "Iron Ring” with a “chain and wooden block fixed thereto" or being placed in the "Dark Room". Ominous allowances for additional

"correction and corporal punishment" were also mentioned.125. In an 1805 plan, forbade any use of corporal punishment.126 However, physical brutality was replaced with the isolation and depravation of solitary confinement in the “black Hole” and the humiliation of exclusion from the communal meal. 127 Usurping the authority of those with custodial functions could lead to dire consequences.

The predilection of residents to launch daring escapes contains all the hallmarks of a prison environment. Seventy-year-old alcoholic Matthew Richards scaled the fence, was captured and then made a second successful attempt that same day. He was described as a frequent “customer” of the almshouse who “always took this method in getting out”.128 At the heart of most escape attempts was the “denial of discharge”; departure had to be approved by the almshouse staff and frequently was not.129 The desire to quickly

124 Committee to Digest a Plan for the More Effectual Relief of the Poor, “Plan for the government of the alms-house,” 15. 125 Rules and Regulations, 1816, 11. 126 Committee to Digest a Plan for the More Effectual Relief of the Poor, “Plan for the government of the alms-house,” (Philadelphia: Kimber, Conrad and Company: 1805), 18. 127Smith and Shelton. "The Daily Occurrence Docket”, 188. It’s drafters included fellow board members of the Magdalen Society Robert Ralston and John Harris. 128 Smith, “The Institutional Docket,” 45. 129 Smith and Shelton, "The Daily Occurrence Docket,” 186.

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leave the almshouse by climbing the fence or sneaking past the main gate was motivated by a host of factors including craving alcohol to reunion with family members. However, despite the pernicious tension surrounding escapees’ “ungrateful method of acknowledging thanks”, there was a sort of jovial certain cat-and-mouse game played between recalcitrant residents and their equally ambivalent keepers. 130 Robert Clare was a “well known frequent and worthless customer” who could “scale the fence upon a pence as well as most jumpers”.131

Given the unchanging schedule and the punitive restrictions placed on residents, was the almshouse a prison in disguise? The almshouse was not a prison. It operated with the disciplinary features of a prison but did not enforce them with the necessary unction and regularity. Cynical assessments of the residents ran to the core of the administrator’s deep ambivalence to reform residents. Philip Haines, it was written, is “come in as usual to be fed and kept warm during the winter and jump the fence in the Spring." 132 Rather, the almshouse was a miserably run institution, facing a task it was justifiably ill-equipped to tackle- namely, to solve the growing problem of social inequality.

Rather than the threat and malevolent deviousness of the criminal fugitive, escaping men and women were characters in mischievous escapades recounted with comicality by the almshouse clerk. Just one day after his successful escape, James

McGroty returned to the almshouse to ludicrously taunt his former warden. He was seen

“tantalizing his ward mates by holding a bottle of rum and shaking and putting it to his mouth by way of contempt and defiance to W. Cummings who at the juncture was

130 Smith, “The Institutional Docket,” 45. 131 Smith and Shelton, "The Daily Occurrence Docket,” 186 132 Smith and Shelton, "The Daily Occurrence Docket,” 191.

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standing at the corner of the fence, looking at him ”133 McGroty’s “contempt” was an amusing reminder of the confusing and sometimes playful relationship that residents had with their keepers as well as the failure of the almshouse as a disciplinary institution.

Incredibly lax attitudes were taken towards controlling alcohol despite the strong rhetoric of intemperance beyond the almshouse walls. Rum was allowed at the

Philadelphia almshouse until 1797. 134 Though all strong liquors were subsequently prohibited, the almshouse steward was permitted to give alcohol to “deserving” residents.

This may explain the 92 gallons of whiskey puzzlingly reported in the 1804 annual expenses.135 Friends or contacts snuck liquor into the almshouse to residents. Evidence shows that Matrons would also occasionally give alcohol to obstinate alcoholics.136 There was thus no shortage of alcohol in an institution that was intended to be entirely devoid of it. These quite parochial responses reflect the disconnect between the moral weltanschauung that underpinned reform efforts discussed in chapter 2 and the difficult realties of maintaining variegated institutions in a strict rubric of routine and regulation.

As reformers trumpeted the evils of intemperance outside, alcohol flowed freely inside the almshouse. Alcoholism was one of “one of the most destructive vices of the nation” yet it was tacitly permitted by the almshouse administrators.137

v Summary

133 Smith and Shelton, "The Daily Occurrence Docket,” 187. 134 Klebaner, Public Poor Relief in America, 159. 135 Guardians for the Relief and Employment of the Poor, “The Accounts of the Guardians of the Poor, 1803-1804,” 3-8. 136 William McNeely, Minutes of the almshouse visitation Concerning the Charges Against the Directors and Steward of the Institution Containing the Charges and the Testimony, (Doylestown, Pennsylvania: Simeon Siegfried, 1819), 52-53. 137 Pennsylvanian Society for Discouraging the Use of Ardent Spirits. “Circular,”, 2.

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Reports that were critical of the almshouse’s failings by figures like Dorothea Dix abounded in later mid-century literature and have been the focus of much attention. 138

However, there is evidence that public awareness of almshouses’ failure surfaced as early as the 1810s.139 In Philadelphia, one anonymous citizen believed “ the Philadelphia alms- house is managed about as badly as it can be.”140 At an almshouse in nearby Bucks

County, breakfast was reported to be "rye slop" and the residents’ diet was "too little and not nutritive enough".141 Furthermore, the Matron disregarded those that died in the almshouse from illness, viewing them as “poor miserable vagabonds, whose bad conduct had brought them here”.142

Philadelphia’s almshouse was intended as an institution that unified different types of medical, social and economic reform but it fractured into a chaotic entity. The discrepancy of theory and practice- of lofty rules from lowly realities- in the almshouse translated into administrative negligence and this, if anything was the defining feature of the sprawling ‘total institution’. What did inattention and ambivalence mean for the poor and marginal in Philadelphia? They could be good when they allowed for freedom and familiarity. Congenial relationships between some residents and staff meant that the latter often turned a blind-eye to the flow of alcohol and sexual activities. Yet for the especially vulnerable homeless and sick, the administration’s ambivalence meant all but ‘total’ abandonment.

138 See: Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum, 197-201. 139 See: McNeely, Minutes of the almshouse visitation. 140 Anonymous, “The Philanthropist,” 90. 141 McNeely, Minutes of the almshouse visitation, 51 142 McNeely, Minutes of the almshouse visitation, 71

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Chapter V: The Magdalen Society of Philadelphia: a Case Study

At the corner of what is now 21st and Race Streets, the Magdalen Society of Philadelphia established an asylum in 1807 for “the refuge and improvement of such Females as have been seduced from the paths of Virtue, and who are desirous to return thereunto.” 143 The simple brick building occupied an open plot of grass, located in the semi-rural outskirts of Philadelphia. The Magdalen asylum was a leading innovation of social welfare in the

United States.144 As an unprecedented experiment in Philadelphia, it faced many difficulties in bringing respectable, predominantly upper middle class men under the same roof as women who had “led unchaste and depraved lives” through a “criminal career”. 145 However, the asylum was remarkably successful because it was able to configure multiple environments of reform that existed simultaneously.

I: The Organization and Theory

On November the 12th 1822 between listings for newly patented heating devices, for seamstresses and wet nurses, for shareholder meetings and departing schooners, barks and brigs to Bristol, Liverpool and Amsterdam, the attentive reader of Zachary Poulson’s

American Daily Advertiser would have found a small notice announcing a meeting of the

Magdalen Society for members at 6pm that evening at Carpenter’s Hall.

143 MSP, AM Vol. 1, June 7th 1808. 144 Though an earlier asylum in London had lent it its name and purpose, it was largely unconnected. For the first Magdalen Society in Britain, see: Stanley Nash, "Prostitution and charity: The Magdalen Hospital, a case study," Journal of Social History (1984): 617-628. 145 MSP, BoM Vol. 3, August 17th 1821.

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When the Magdalen Society identified itself as a private "voluntary association", it meant that it relied extensively on the time, energy and money of its members 146 The

Society administered the asylum through several committees, that included standing

Manufacturing, Visiting, Election, Clothing and Building committees. Similar to the fall meeting advertised at Carpenter’s Hall, the Society held an annual meeting each

February. There, a report on the asylum was read out and sometimes printed for circulation in the wider public. The report’s language was invariably staid and included few specifics in favor of rapturous monologues. The details of the asylum that do remain today are largely to be found in the minutes for the Board of Managers, the entity staffed by the Visiting Committee’s asylum managers.

The managers comprised an elected group of the Society’s most active members and effectively administered the finances, policies and admissions of the asylum. Being a manager meant taking on considerable responsibility and a large time commitment.

Working in monthly rotations, a different pair of Managers would visit the asylum each week to enquire into the cleanliness and running of the institution as well as the behavior of the Magdalens, paying special attention to those recently admitted. They also offered

"advice and counsel” 147 informally, though strict rules prevented any discussion between a Manager and a Magdalen without either the former’s colleague or the Matron being present. 148 The Manager was the cornerstone of the asylum’s extra-institutional administration, acting as the vital link that joined the asylum to the Society. He arbitrated

146 MSP, AM Vol. 1, August 7th 1808. 147 Ibid, 1808. 148 MSP, AM Vol 1, 1807: “Rules of the House”.

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conflicts, adjudicated accusations of misconduct, secured future employment for departing Magdalens and made the final decision on almost all matters of daily importance.

What sort of members did the Magdalen Society have to fill these important roles? A glance at the Society’s founding leadership in March 1800 reveals some of the city’s “most active and respectable citizens" 149. The Society’s inaugural president

William White was the first Episcopal bishop in the United States and chaplain to the

Continental Congress. Robert Wharton, the vice president, was then serving as the influential Mayor of Philadelphia. Thus, the two figureheads in the early life of the

Magdalen Society were leading comptrollers of the spiritual and political life of

Philadelphia.

Working on the Society’s Standing Committee was an equally illustrious group of founding members: Edward Garrigues was president of the Philadelphia Board of Health

Office that year; John Letchworth was vice president of the prominent Pennsylvania

Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery 150 and John Inskeep was a notable publisher. Finally, Robert Ralston, an active manager and then later vice president of the

Society, was founder of the Philadelphia Fuel Savings Society and elected president of the Common Council of Philadelphia.151 Ralston, like other active members, “seemed to have his hand in nearly every new benevolent activity that emerged in the new republic”

149 See Appendix 5; Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, January 23 1804. 150 Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, January 16 1800. 151 Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, January 26 1804.

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and cofounded the Philadelphia Dispensary with Bishop White. 152 The Magdalen

Society’s members were thus a very powerful unit that possessed immense political and social capital in Philadelphia.

However, the Society was not just a male-run institution. In February 1819, it was agreed that the “usefulness of the Managers at the asylum would be greatly increased by our associating with us a number of pious discreet Females to assist in advising and directing the unhappy objects of our care”153 The first of these women, including Susanna

Page and Sarah Munns, were wives of Society members. One year later, the “pious, discreet women” had enjoyed such success that they expanded and were formalized into a permanent committee. Henceforth, two women visited their “erring sisters” each week like the managers but taught literacy as well encouraged the “pursuit of piety and virtue”.

154 Though they did not play a role in the bureaucracy of the Society, female members became some important agents of change within the asylum itself and represented another unique facet of the Magdalen Society in 19th century philanthropy.

The Society’s administrators were also a motley bunch of Quakers, Presbyterians and Lutherans but they shared the common purpose of philanthropic work in the

Christian tradition of charity. An estimated two out of every three Quaker men in the

Magdalen Society and similar organizations were affiliated with the Orthodox contingent

152 Dorsey, City of brotherly love, 107. 153 MSP, BoM Vol. 3, February 1819. “Annual Report” 154 MSP, BoM Vol. 3, February 1820 . “Annual Report”.

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of the Society of Friends. 155 With their progressive view of mercantilism and biblical worship, they included figures like Jacob S. Waln, an active merchant, philanthropist and state politician.156 The Magdalen Society was influenced by the traditions of its Quaker members. The Society of Friends had long had groups that would ‘oversee’ the behavior of members as well enquire into suspicious behavior within the local chapter.157 This type of Quaker institution served as the direct antecedent to the Society’s Visiting Committee.

Presbyterian members were also influential in the work of the Society in addition to Bishop White. Alexander Henry, who served as an asylum manager and later officer, was one of the founders of the extensive and highly influential American Sunday School

Union and later president of the American Sunday School Union. He was also an officer of the main Philadelphia Presbyterian Church.158 Robert Ralston was ordained Ruling

Elder of the Second Presbyterian Church in 1802, just two years after the Society’s founding.159 Ralston’s was also cofounder of the important Philadelphia Bible and

Philadelphia Missionary Societies. The religiously heterogeneous group maintained its non-sectarian ecumenism to function as a unique body politic where no group single denomination emerged to steer the direction of the society’s spiritual philanthropy.

155 Bruce Dorsey, "Friends Becoming Enemies: Philadelphia Benevolence and the Neglected Era of American Quaker History," Journal of the Early Republic 18 (1998): 416. 156 Henry Simpson, The Lives of Eminent Philadelphians, Now deceased collected from original and authentic sources, (Philadelphia: William Brotherhead, 1859), 937. 157Patricia D'Antonio, Founding Friends: Families, Staff, and Patients at the Friends Asylum in Early Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Lehigh University Press, 2006), 35; Also see: Dorsey, City of brotherly love, 73. Dorsey notes the rise of welfare committees during the Revolutionary War as tool of self-sufficiency. 158 Simpson, The Lives of Eminent Philadelphians, 510-515. 159 Simpson, The Lives of Eminent Philadelphians, 825-826.

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w Private Practice?

These “respectable” citizens conferred legitimacy and power onto the Society’s work. Whilst ostensibly classified as a private institution, the organization received regular "donations" from the municipal government.160 The Society often met at the grand offices of the Board of Health and the State House for their committees as well, undoubtedly through the connections of Edward Garrigues and Mayor Wharton. Did the mission of redeeming ‘fallen women’ overlap with the municipal government’s concern about vice? It is tempting to read into the asylum’s political connections as evidence of

‘state infiltration’, in the postructuralist Foucauldian sense. Noteworthy among the

Society’s early members were several of the appointed Philadelphia Inspectors of the

Prison as well as the recently retired City Sheriff Joseph Cowperthwait. The Magdalen asylum, after all, provided a semi-public service without the political entanglement and scrutiny of a tax-subsidized reformatory like the almshouse.

Nonetheless, the low number of residents accepted and housed at the asylum suggests that the Magdalen Society did not function as an arm of the state’s “disciplinary apparatus”.161 There were no formal interlocutors of the municipal or regional government who visited, inspected or publicly directed the structuring of the asylum other than the unofficial support of Wharton et al. The connections that existed between

160 This included marriage and jury fees from the Mayor's Court. MSP, AM Vol. 1 1800. 161 While Foucault imputes grand theory to disciplinary tools for “power and domination”, he recognizes that such “disparate” mechanisms’ diffusion means that they cannot “be localized in a particular type of institution…”. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 26.

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the Society and local government was undoubtedly murky yet it was murky for many other philanthropic organizations (such as the private Philadelphia Hospitable Society and The Female Society of Philadelphia for the Relief and Employment of the Poor, which both received public funds from the Overseers of the Poor}. The very notion of public-private cooperation did not materialize in contemporary discourse until the mid-

1830s. 162 The informal, unstructured state-institution relationship that existed would be best appropriately characterized as an institutional harmony of purposes.

w Intentions and Motives

Having unpacked its internal structure and influential membership, the remaining consideration of the Magdalen Society’s organizational theoretical structuring is understanding what motivated members in their unprecedented organization. Specific to interrogations of institutional social control are the questions ‘what were Society members trying to do in the asylum’ and ‘why were they trying to do it’?

The increasing moralization of social deviancy discussed in Chapter 2 offers one partial explanation for the Society’s mission “to aid in restoring to the path of Virtue, and to be instrumental in recovering to honest rank in life” the ‘fallen women’ it called

Magdalens.163 Weariness at the corpulent state of Philadelphia’s moral integrity was socially valent for many city residents. It necessitated active intervention in the underground world of prostitution and sexual criminality. The Society aspired to

162 See: Clement, "Nineteenth-Century Welfare Policy”. 163 MSP, BoM Vol. 1, undated (1803?).

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overcome vice by healing the city through acts of ‘redemption’ and ‘conversion’ but was not a thoroughly evangelic organization.

Evidence suggests that involvement in philanthropic enterprises like the

Magdalen Society were supposed to facilitate a mutually beneficial “moral” conversation between benefactor and recipient. 164 For Society members, their unprecedented conversation with “daughters of guilt" was meant to be spiritually rewarding. 165 The sense of fulfillment that invariably accompanied acts of charity offered an incentive to those seeking moral self-gratification. Frequent allusions to personal satisfaction accruing from their acts of spiritual benevolence, embodied in the Good Samaritan’s pouring of

“oil and wine into the hearts of the repentant sufferers"166 An exuberant author of the

Society’s annual report exclaimed to his fellow members: “shall we not rejoice and be encouraged to go on in our labours of love so long as we have any ground to hope that through our agency even one such immortal being shall be made a happy being?” 167 The

‘restoration’ and ‘recovery’ of impious women not only offered tangible benefits to the moral well-being of society but was also gratifying and viewed as central to one’s own religious development.

Elsewhere in the early 19th century world and most manifestly in Imperial Russia, the social grouping of technocratic, well-educated urban elites had precipitated a secular

164 Tocqueville, Memoir on pauperism, 31. 165 MSP, BoM Vol. 5, 1848 (196). 166 MSP, BoM Vol. 3, February 1820. 167 MSP, BoM Vol. 3, February 1818. “Annual Report”

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“ethos of service to society".168 The laurels that state and community recognition bestowed in the form of tangible awards and titles fueled this thoroughly class-conscious

“ethos”. “Service” also brought equally important, but ephemeral, accolades of social respectability and legitimacy that energized philanthropic efforts. Antebellum

Philadelphia was quite different from the monarchically constrained intelligentsia of

Russia and much of Europe but it shared a similarly vibrant and self-contained group of doctors, lawyers, publishers and scholars that constituted a well-educated and active nomenclature of urban philanthropists. Most lived in close proximity to each other within

Philadelphia’s tightly packed downtown and participated in the same philanthropic efforts. They represented a nascent community of post-colonial professionals building their own identity.169 From this self-aware community, Philadelphia’s intelligentsia grew a social network formed through fraternal philanthropic enterprises.

So far as participation in the Magdalen Society and similar organizations conveyed respectability and legitimacy within the growing social network of activism, it also allowed men and women to better articulate their own unique identity within the public sphere of the growing metropolis. As the city’s population exploded through the early 19th century, it became important to find a sense of belonging. For the Philadelphia congregation of the Society of Friends, philanthropy provided an opportunity to strengthen its presence in civil society and the life of the city. Further, contacts in the

168Adele Lindenmeyr, "The Ethos of charity in Imperial Russia," Journal of Social History (1990): 687. 169 For example, next door to William White’s home was Benjamin Rush, one of the leading advocates for abolition and penal reform. Rush was one of the founders of the Philadelphia Dispensary with Bishop White and Ralston

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business and social world were available through the archetypal patronage network the

Magdalen Society afforded its members. Some of the leading political and business titans of Philadelphia were officers or principle benefactors of the Magdalen Society.

In the surveying the forms of voluntarism present in the Magdalen Society, one finds a multifaceted constellation of concomitant motivations and backgrounds.

Voluntary associations formed “a crucial link-often the crucial link- between the individual and society as a whole” and the Magdalen Society’s eclectic membership clearly functioned as a particularly extensive and powerful community of Philadelphia intelligentsia.170

Section II: The asylum

In the following section, the asylum will be disassembled into three spatial experiences: the home, the convent and the prison. Like the city almshouse, the Magdalen asylum contained different meanings within itself. However, the asylum’s function was purposeful and two-fold: to provide restraint " from the company and corrupt conversations of their former associates" and, sustained seclusion "from public notice a suitable length of time".171 The qualities of the home, the convent and the prison each contributed to the transformative sequestration of Magdalens but in very different ways.

170 Miller, “Introduction”, 3. 171 MSP, AM Vol. 1, February 10th 1807.

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w Arrival

Ascending the steps of the redbrick building, a young woman would be ushered into a salon where she awaited the matron. Arriving at the Magdalen asylum was not difficult but staying there could be. The process of admittance was ostensibly similar to the almshouse but more strictly enforced. An application was submitted to a Manager of the asylum. They enquired into the applicant's "worthiness", including state of mind and condition of health. Some women were referred to the Society by concerned acquaintances. Managers also visited solicited potential Magdalens at the almshouse and prison whereupon they were identified as “proper subjects”. An interview was then conducted but little evidence survives of what this entailed. It was necessary for applicants to show contrition and “remorse” 172 If the young woman was to successfully complete each of these requirements and processes, she would be given a number and a set of clothes. The Society’s records give no indication of how many women were rejected.

The majority of applicants appealed to the Society for assistance of their own volition. The Society sought women who wanted admission themselves rather than through the arguments of someone else, as was often the case with other institutions. It was vital that an applicant was "desirous” of joining the “family” rather than being forced legally or through deception.173 Despite what was likely an intensely humiliating application process, many vulnerable, poor and tired women of Philadelphia persisted in joining the asylum. Why? It is difficult to answer this given that no testimonies exist

172 MSP, BoM Vol. 1, undated (est. 1803?). 173 MSP, BoM Vol. 1, February 7th 1806.

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detailing of Magdalen’s expectations, hopes or desires before entering the asylum.

However, likely reasons include the peaceful serenity, privacy and security of the walled asylum; the comfort of three regular meals; the promise of finding subsequent employment; and, perhaps, the companionship of other women.

By the first decade of the its opening, the asylum had residents from Georgia,

Virginia, South Carolina, Maryland, Massachusetts, Delaware, and Ohio as well as

Ireland, Germany and Britain. These women’s long journeys reflected the increasing migratory character of the age that bridged communities and borders. The majority of

Magdalens were still local natives of Philadelphia and the surrounding Chester and Bucks

Counties, as well as nearby New Jersey and New York. There were 172 Magdalens who had passed through the doors of the asylum as of August of 1821. By 1848, 830 women had had arrived.174

The admittance figures were smaller than public relief institutions like the almshouse and reflected the unique demographic of young, ‘fallen women’ the asylum selectively admitted. The organization’s concentration on redeeming youth grew in the increased in later years. From 1878 to 1893, those aged 17-20 in the asylum nearly doubled to 64.8% whilst those over 25 decreased from 30% to 0.175 Because younger

Magdalens had less experience, it was thought they would be more redeemable. Naïve youth carried the latent promise of exciting transformation and redemption, whilst older

174 MSP, BoM Vol. VI, February 1st 1848. 175 Steven Ruggles, "Fallen Women: The Inmates of the Magdalen Society Asylum of Philadelphia, 1836-1908," Journal of Social History (1983): 67.

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women were perceived as stubborn and hopeless cases. Ageist dogmas in the asylum informed the broader discourse of virtuosity and sin surrounding the Magdalens.

Contrary to the Society’s expressed focus on reforming prostitutes, many

Magdalens were not sex workers or “daughters of guilt” but women who had been sexually abused or had willfully pursued “immoral” sexual relations. Sexual deviancy was moralized in such a way that disparate sexual narratives of Magdalens- from rape to infidelity to prostitution- were conflated under the term ‘fallen woman’. Therefore, whilst the Society’s stated mission was to rehabilitate women "who profess repentance for their criminal career", less than half of the Magdalens had actually been prostitutes.176 As in the London Magdalen Society, the Philadelphia Magdalen Society found that a good deal of its residents had not worked as prostitutes and it was necessary to broaden its definition of ‘fallen woman’ to include any suspicion of feminine sexual agency.177

w The Society as Home

Newly arrived Magdalens found they had become members of a unique

“family”.178 The asylum was the family’s home. The house was designed around a family unit as a contained enterprise presided over by the parental figures of Steward and

Matron. They spent their time passing on skills to the Magdalens in the “various branches of domestic economy” to be used for life beyond the home. They gave “counsel and advice” and reassured their filial charges, offering “encouragement to persevere in their

176 MSP, BoM Vol. 3, August 17th 1821. 177 Nash, Prostitution and Charity, 619. 178 MSP, BoM Vol. 2 February 1st 1815.

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endeavours".179 The steward was the vigilant father figure. The matron watched "over the

Magdalens in sickness and in health, as a Mother in a family of daughters."180

Initially, before the purchase and running of the Magdalen asylum, “respectable” families had served in reverse "as a temporary assylum {sic.}".181 The family unit was perceived to act as counterbalance to prostitution and vice: it engendered reciprocity, trust and deference. More subtly, it operated as a nurturing surrogate to Magdalens for the community of the debauched company of the brothel and the almshouse. The ultimate fruition of the domestic transformation was a spiritual version of republican motherhood.

The managers found cause of celebration when often describing Magdalens "on the brink of destruction” who had become, thanks to their efforts, “respectably married… and enjoying the comforts of their families”.182

Key to this vision of 19th century domesticity was the juxtaposition of the

“family” and the “world” for women: the family home was a sanctuary whilst the outside world was a dark void of threats and frivolities.183 For a Magdalen to verily succeed, she had to find her way onto the path of virtue through an honorable marriage. In the social context of the Magdalen Society, marriage was doubly important: it was an effectuation of the domestic ambition and it signified a surefire reformation from former lives of

179 MSP, AM Vol. 1 February 12th 1822. 180 MSP, BoM Vol. 4 February 8th 1826. 181 MSP, BoM Vol. 1 February 11th 1805. 182 MSP, BoM Vol. 2, February 2nd 1816. 183Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780- 1835, (Yale University Press, 1997), 64.

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deviance. The archetype narrative of Magdalens’ life after the asylum was thus a transition from one family to another, from the institutional asylum to the private home.

Magdalen women were also often framed- and treated- as children in their

“family”. They were referred to intermittently as “sisters” and “daughters”. Some historians have cast the power relations implicit in infantilizing the Magdalens as indicative of a condescending and malevolent institution. 184 Though there may be some truth in understanding this as coercive paternalism, there is also considerable danger of anachronism in exclusively reading the house’s filial relationship negatively. Many

Magdalens were children. There were some as young as 15 and many aged between 17 and 16 at the asylum between 1807-1817.

The idea of the youthful, intimate family was also bound-up with notions of chastity that implied childlessness and translated into little toleration for pregnancy. 185

Article 17 of the Society’s Rules of the House explicitly prevented any “pregnant or diseased” woman admittance to the House.186 The fact that this policy was overlooked when allowing sick women into the asylum- but not pregnant women- implies the seriousness with which the no child policy was taken. It has been attributed to the higher costs of offering maternity and childcare services that the Society would have incurred as well as a deficiency of medical expertise.187 However, this argument seems weak given that the private Female Society for the Relief and Employment of the Poor’s House of

184 See: Carlisle, Prostitutes and their reformers, 182-183. 185 MSP, BoM Vol. 2, September 6th 1814. 186 MSP, BoM Vol. 1, November 7th 1809. 187 Carlisle, Prostitutes and their reformers, 182-183.

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Industry and the public Almshouses both accommodated large families, the former having its own daycare facility and the latter a structured schooling system and wet- nurses.188

There were likely other reasons for the exclusion of children and newborns from the asylum. The focus on familial piety may have been incompatible with the presence of illegitimate and unwanted children. The ultimate objective of the Society was that its residents should become "respectably married" and enjoy their own family, whereas the

Almshouse's contrasting focus on pauperism did not preclude past illegitimation. Next, the presence of children may have been perceived as a threat to the integrity of the

‘asylum as home’. If Magdalens were the redemptive progeny of the asylum, young children would have subverted the psychological and moral structuring of the institution as well as the filial power structure of matron and steward.

The stability of the family home was taken very seriously. Mary Benson had become "become so unruly as to disturb the peace of the family" and for this, she was promptly dismissed from the house in June 1810.189 The domestic model was an unstable one in reformatory institutions. In many philanthropic organizations, the original concept of the ‘asylum as family’ could not weather the increasingly professional, depersonalized atmosphere of institutional life by mid-century. 190 Space grew between administrators and residents accompanied by increased institutional specialization and resident

188 Haviland, "Beyond Women's Sphere”, 428-30. 189 MSP, BoM Vol. 2, July 3rd 1810. 190 D'Antonio, Founding Friends, 129.

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classification, tearing apart the family ethos. Within the Philadelphia Friend’s asylum- the Quaker psychiatric institution that paralleled the Magdalen Society in chronology and innovation- a “professional”, substituting ‘family’ with ‘hospital’, occurred as "the idea of domesticity gave way to that of science." 191 The opposite happened in the Magdalen

Society: it found a greater feeling of ‘family’ towards the 1840s. Life in the home was more sheltered from the social vicissitudes and trends beyond the asylum walls thanks to the thoroughly private and autonomous nature of the Society.

w The Asylum as Convent:

The asylum was a family, but it was fundamentally a family of “sisters” held together by a devotional bond of redemption and transformation. The same unequivocal isolation that was needed to "wean them from their vicious habits" was associated in the contemporary imagination with the convent and nunnery.192 As much a family as it was a convent, the asylum existed as a sanctuary for Magdalens that protected them “from the assaults and temptations of insidious men"193

Early 19th century private philanthropic institutions were thoroughly religious operations and this is central to considering the what, where and why of the Magdalen

Society’s early cultural significance as an organization. The ‘refuge’ and ‘improvement’ the asylum was tasked with were contiguous with its environment of monastic tranquility.

The daily routine revolved around devotional scripture, when every morning and evening

191 Ibid, 152. 192 MSP, AM Vol. 1, February 13th 1810. 193 MSP, AM Vol. 1, May 12th 1807.

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the Matron, Steward or a Magdalen were to “read one or more chapters or portions of scripture” 194 On Monday, “a suitable portion of time in the forenoon, and the same in the afternoon, is to be set apart for reading and pious devotion.” 195 On Sundays, Bishop

White would often visit for Sabbath.196

Magdalens were to embody seriousness and pureness in their simple muslin attire.

Dress was prescribed to fine details and included a grey gown and petticoat, white cotton stockings, white muslin neck handkerchiefs, muslin cap and black leather shoes. 197 The house was similarly demure in its sparse furnishings. The inventory for the entire building included just 2 good pine tables, 1 broken table, 2 tin plate stoves, 1 brasstop shovel and tongs, 2 patent lamps, 3 cedar tubs, 1 cedar pail and 1 sweeping brush.198 In addition were 10 bed-stands, 9 mattresses, 1 feather bed, 10 pillows, 30 blankets, 8 bed quilts, 6 spreads, 18 sheets and 10 pillow cases.” 199 The simplicity of these utilitarian belongings appears to have been a product of both fiscal constraints and ascetic considerations. However, effort was made to keep the property attractive and well maintained as a refuge from the outside world. The managers landscaped a gravel pathway through the garden and one can observe neat and smart wooden benches dotted throughout the property beneath trees in photos.200

194 MSP, BoM Vol. 1, 1807. “Rules of the House”. 195 MSP, BoM Vol. 1, 1807. “Rules of the House”. 196 See: MSP, Matron's Diary Vol. 1, 1829-1834. 197 Teeters, "The early days of the Magdalen Society of Philadelphia," 162. 162. 198 MSP, BoM Vol. 2, undated (pg 52). 199 MSP, BoM Vol. 2, February 2nd 1813. 200 See: appendix 4

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Many aspects of the reformatory environment were focused to facilitating a spiritual (re) education. There were rules to follow, such as absence of any insensitive dialogue. Managers sought to construct a quiet and somber environment for careful reflection. The asylum had a small library of books from its earliest days for the

Magdalens. What did they read? A list of books diligently shortlisted, approved and then purchased by the Visiting Committee for the asylum in 1810 gives some indication.201 All were popular and well-printed books rather than obscure works or tracts. E. Frank' s

Lessons for Young Persons in Humble Life was a literacy textbook that contained poorly hidden moral lessons of sobriety, industry and frugality in its comprehension exercises.202

There was Milton's Paradise Lost and several of John Bunyan's allegorical fables, such as

The Pilgrim's Progress and the Heavenly Footman. Interestingly, many books in the small collection appear to have been on the theme of death and were perhaps intended to instill consciousness of mortality. These included British poet Edward Young's famous

Night-Thoughts203 and French theologian Charles Drelincourt's sobering The Christians

Defence Against the Fears of Death, whose sobering central message was that "the sufferings of this life are but short…but the torments of the damned shall never end; their worm dieth not, and their fire shall never be quenched".204

201 MSP, BoM Vol. 2, August 7th 1810. 202 Included comments such as “What can be a more shocking sight than a drunken man? Nothing; except a drunken woman" (pg. 185). E. Frank, “Lessons for Young Persons in Humble Life,” (York, England: Thomas Wilson and Sons, 1842). 203 One wanders how a Magdalen would have interpreted the lines: " Our faults are at the bottom of our pains/ Error, in act, or judgement, is the source/ Of endless sighs: we sin, or we mistake;" (Pg. 251) Edward Young, “Night-Thoughts,” (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1853). 204 Charles Drelincourt, The Christians Defence Against the Fears of Death, Translated by Marisu D’Assigny (London: J Buckland, 1789).

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The asylum’s reading list offers a fascinating window onto the religious-cultural life of the institution. Perhaps most striking was the denominational heterogeneity of these carefully selected books: Bunyan was a Baptist-Puritan polyglot, Drelincourt was firmly Protestant and Young was unaffiliated. Rather than any denominational leaning towards Presbyterian, evangelical or Quaker dogmatic texts, one sees instead a thematic focus on death, moral proselytizing and stories directed towards the 'young'. There was no single, denominational master narrative, only the unifying mission of redemption.

w The asylum as Prison

In addition to the family household and convent, the experience of those behind the brick walls of 21st and Race Streets is framed most often through a third perspective that presents the ‘asylum as a prison’. This social control analogy is based on a particular

“carceral” interpretation of the institution’s changing system of containment, symbolized in instrumental architecture, modes of surveillance and, most prominently, the property’s divisive fence.205

By the mid-1830s, Magdalens were routinely refereed to as 'inmates' in Society records. A shift had undeniably occurred amongst the administrators away from the idealism of the asylum’s first years. There is considerable evidence that some Magdalens felt “restricted " and tension existed between authority and nonconformity behind the asylum walls. Residents complained that they did not have enough liberty to stroll through the asylum grounds, to awaken comfortably in the morning or even to eat the

205 For description of spatial social control mechanisms at the asylum, see: Lu Ann De Cunzo, "On reforming the “fallen” and beyond: Transforming continuity at the Magdalen Society of Philadelphia, 1845–1916," International Journal of Historical Archaeology 5 (2001): 19-43.

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natural fruits growing in the garden. Some were unhappy with the quality of meals. 206

Sarah Craig, "dissatisfied with the restraints of the House”, decided to escape. 207

Ÿ Escape

In July 1819, Maria Rutter, Abigail Dorman and Eliza Read made their escape

“by scaling the fence".208 Magdalens could, in fact, request to leave the asylum; they were under no legal mandate to remain. However, the significant number of those who did ‘elope’ and the furtive nature in which they did so suggests that there were more barriers to departing than simply walking out the front door. According to the Society’s

Rules and Regulations, Magdalens were not “permitted to go out of the asylum without the leave of the Visiting Committee.”209 Magdalens desiring to leave had to receive permission from the manager or board they would explain their reasons and possibly have to defend them.210 The managers were also restricted from dismissing or discharging any Magdalen “without some means being provided by which she may obtain an honest livelihood” 211

The social control narrative implicitly requires some form of institutional containment. In the Magdalen asylum, this can be found in the deeply symbolic race between control and escape- of more frequent attempts and higher fences. The asylum’s

206 MSP, BoM Vol. 4, November 2nd 1830. From: Teeters, "The early days of the Magdalen Society of Philadelphia,"165. 207 MSP, BoM Vol. 2, November-December 1817. 208 MSP, BoM Vol. 3, July 6th 1819. 209 MSP, BoM Vol. 1, 1807. “Rules of the House”. 210 Carlisle, Prostitutes and their reformers, 171. 211 MSP, BoM Vol. 1, 1807 (79-80).

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first fence was built for the "convenience and security of the Magdalens"212 Society records refer to escapes as “elopements” or leaving “without permission". The first escape from the asylum was Magdalen No. 6, due, it was thought, to her "partial derangement of intellect", as well as a "deceitful and desperately wicked" heart.213 The

Visiting Committee responded by building a larger fence around the “whole” property, measuring “at least eight feet high”. 214 Magdalens continued to breach the walls in persistent attempts of resistance and escape.

In one particularly embarrassing incident in 1820, four Magdalens “obtained possession of the keys” on the evening of June 19th and opened the locks to make their getaway.215 A larger fence was constructed that year and the manager’s began to express an unmistakable weariness of the tenacity several Magdalens demonstrated in their persistent escapes. The Visiting Committee went so far as to recommended that all harmless items in the garden be removed “to preclude them being used to facilitate an approach to, or departure from the house"216 In 1843, following unrelated storm repairs to the house, the fence was replaced with a formidable brick wall measuring 15ft high and

14-inchs thick. 217 The asylum perimeter was now more firmly contained and a shadow cast over part of the garden.

212 MSP, AM Vol. 1, December 3rd 1806. 213 MSP, BoM Vol. 1, January 11th 1808. 214 MSP, BoM Vol. 3, February 15th 1810. 215 MSP, BoM Vol. 3 July 4th July 1820. 216 Ibid, July 4th July 1820. It is interesting that by far the greatest expense in rebuilding the fence were its new iron spikes. MSP BoM Vol. 3, April 4th 1820. 217 MSP, AM, Volume 3, August 14th 1843.

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It appears that the overwhelming majority of escapes occurred in the summer months of July and August. The absence of any recorded elopements through the turgid eastern months of January-March is consistent with the hypothesis that escape was highly seasonal. Even for those who found the asylum unpleasant, it nonetheless provided them with the warmth, food and security that were scarce in winter months. These commodities were too essential to pass up and were evidently an attraction for every ilk of resident in the house. Unlike the solitary and dramatic breakouts of those in the almshouse, many Magdalens escaped with each other. Deborah Register and Ann Carr, both 18, were just some of the many pairs of Magdalens who decided to escape together.218 Many Magdalens evidently formed a sisterly bond of trust and friendship during their abortive stay at the asylum.

Ÿ Control?

If the Magdalen asylum ever existed as a “carceral system”, it needed orderly routine and surveillance as a prerequisite.219 Did the administrators buttress the impregnable asylum walls with practices of surveillance? The Matron and Steward were required to “keep a private record” of the Magdalens “with such information relating to their conduct and behavior as may considered by the Managers to be useful and necessary”. They were also to record “letters of the Magdalens”.220 A mysterious fragment of glued-together, flimsy scrap paper from 1885 is all that remains today of a much larger list logging the number and date of letters sent to each Magdalen at the

218 MSP, BoM Vol. 2, July 5th 1815. 219 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 277. 220 MSP, BoM Vol. 1, undated (pg. 105).

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asylum. There is no evidence to indicate that these letters were confiscated or censored but they were reviewed and some indeed copied.221 At the 1863 annual meeting, several

"interesting letters” of Magdalens were read aloud and later published with the annual report. 222

However, some skepticism should be exercised when discussing the extent to which the asylum was operated within a mode of rigorous surveillance. The records kept by the Matron were hasty and conveyed a disinterest in compiling any data or information.223 Though the managers were more enthusiastic in their bureaucratic documentation, they also frequently betrayed a deep incongruity towards any customary

'surveillance'. In September 1819, not only was the monthly asylum report from the managers' visiting committee missing and forgotten, none of the members present was even aware of the number of Magdalens present in the asylum.224

Ÿ Frustration

The managers could be much more unapologetic and bitter in their assessment of

‘elopers’ than their ambivalent counterparts at the almshouse. Because fugitive

Magdalens had failed in overcoming their “habits of vicious indulgence”, they were unworthy of the family. 225 No escapees were readmitted, as was the case routinely at the almshouse. The Magdalens’ acts of defiance embarrassed and vexed the managers.

221 MSP, “1884-5 Record of Letters”, Miscellaneous. 222 MSP, AM Vol. 2, February 10th 1863. 223 See: MSP, Matron’s Diary. 224 MSP, BoM Vol. 3, September ? 1819. 225 MSP, BoM Vol. 2, undated (pg. 19).

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Seeking answers, they raised the possibility of structural problems relating to the incompetence of the original matron and steward.226 The managers also reasoned that the higher number of elopements was due to "the effects of attachment to intoxicating liquors” as well as “the repugnance to the regularity of reform”.227

What were intended as “labors of love” that would accrue great satisfaction for

Society members working at the asylum occasionally turned out to be ‘labor’ without any love. As early as two years into the project, the annual report lamented "the insensibility that generally prevails among these deluded females, and their backwardness to accept the charitable assistance gratuitously offered to them"228 The sense of disillusionment was erratic and did not show any broad trend in the first three decades of operation.

At one point, the managers were so incensed by the seeming intractability of their charges that they dismissed the entire company of Magdalens residing in the house en masse to begin anew. Anger at the obstinacy of several Magdalens sometimes resulted in

“pretty sharp remonstrances {sic}” that stopped short of any formal punishment. 229 The managers often showed signs of frayed nerves resulting from their frustration. That anger evidenced an important, and oft-overlooked disadvantage to running a voluntary association as a professionalized institution in the early 19th century. The responsibility of the managers was as great as their public counterparts but they were neither paid nor qualified and thus liable to express greater emotional fluctuations. Alexander Henry was

226 MSP, Vol. 2, December 7th 1813. 227 MSP, BoM Vol. 3, February 1820. 228 MSP, AM Vol. 1, February 9th 1809. 229 MSP, BoM Vol. 3, December 7th 1819.

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a banker’s son, John McAllister was a well-to-do ironmonger and Beriah Magoffin was a merchant of Cambrick Muslins, Prints, Shirtings”230 These were the figures that were entrusted with the livelihoods of dozens of vulnerable individuals but had no training and rarely any prior institutional familiarity. The manager’s anger and frustration that occasionally arose from the perceived obstinacy of several Magdalens was a part of the asylum experience. However it was only a part of a larger conversation between administrators and residents that occurred over the century and should not cloud the greater complexity and multi-faceted nuance of the institution as convent and family support system. Spending hours reading the Visiting Committee’s minutes, one begins to think that it was the Magdalens who actually ran the asylum through their acts of resistance and compliance, rather than the managers.

w Departure

“You are now about to return to the World. – Reflect on what is past" began a letter that was given to all Magdalens upon their departure. 231 What did life after the asylum look like for Magdalens? Between April 1810 and July 1817, just under one third of Magdalens were "placed out at service" as servants in "respectable” families. This invariably meant employment as a domestic servant, an extremely common practice in the period for young women. Generally, managers waited exactly one year for a

Magdalen to “come to virtue” before they obtained her an employ. The Society organized the majority of these engagements through contacts and the countryside was preferred for

230 Simpson, The Lives of Eminent Philadelphians, 733; Poulson's Advertiser August 20th, 1817. Magoffin was elected as a new member in 1815 and was identifiable in records for his distinctive name. 231 “Advice to a Magdalen”. MSP, BoM Vol.1, May 3rd 1808.

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its solitude but Magdalens were sent to families in the city as well. Being “placed out” provided some modicum of self-sufficiency through a modest income as well as accommodation and security. The managers supported this and applauded Magdalens who saved their salary for “future exigencies”. 232

An enquiry by the managers in 1813 found that, of those placed out at service, 4 had died, 3 had married and 17 were still working at service and "doing well". 233 Despite the managers’ mixed success with tracing down former Magdalens, one observes that the noticeable majority who had been successfully “put out” still remained ‘at service’ in families. The Magdalen Society was successful in its mission. It had proved that it could save the “irreclaimable” by finding them a home, a job and even a husband. Many

Magdalens also became married. This contract of sexual fidelity and attachment secured the piety, respectability and validation of a Magdalen’s redemptive transformation. In addition to successful time “placed out”, the managers applauded the news of every new marriage in the Society minutes.

From the same 1813 enquiry, it was apparent how the ‘failed’ Magdalens had disappeared into the shadows of the city. For those who had been dismissed for improper conduct, one was dead and two others were unknown. The picture was similar for those who had eloped; 1 was dead and the remaining 7 were "unknown….but feared {to} have resorted to their former evil courses”. 234

232 MSP, BoM Vol. 2, February 2nd 1813. 233 Ibid, 1813. 234 Ibid, 1813.

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As well as escaping, marrying and being hired as a domestic servant, younger

Magdalens sometimes returned to their families. 16-year-old Maria Coates was at the asylum for a month before reuniting with her mother in July 1817.235 Similarly, Lydia

Burchell was "received by her parents and taken under their care" three months after her arrival in May 1816.236 It was a policy of the Society not to readmit former Magdalens, because it would "prove a guard and caution to others"237 However, many former

Magdalens were accepted back if they had fallen ill or had trouble with their employer.

The Society’s work did not stop once the Magdalens had left. Magdalens remained in the “family”. The managers tried to track down those who had left to ascertain their condition. They secured placements for women who had not succeeded at their original “service” and they exchanged books and correspondence. Some former

Magdalens even become active in the organization itself. Magdalen No. 93, 16-year-old

Mary Montgomery, was hired directly after her discharge as assistant matron in 1816. 238

Some Magdalens never left. At least thirty Magdalens who died in the asylum are reportedly buried in the grounds, though archeological surveys have not found evidence of graves.239

In ‘reflecting on the past’, Magdalens were cautioned against telling others the

235 MSP, BoM Vol. 3, July ? 1817. 236 MSP, BoM Vol. 2, June 4th 1816. 237 MSP, BoM Vol. 1, March 4th 1806. 238 MSP, BoM Vol. 2, August 6th 1816. 239 De Cunzo, "On reforming the ‘fallen’ and beyond,” 31.

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story of their past life.240 It was believed that the process of redemption required a new identity, tabula rasa. This was part of the reconciliation that the managers sought for the

Magdalens spiritually with God, and temporally with estranged family and friends.

Regardless of where each woman headed after parting with the Society, all found themselves in a very different world from the one they had just left. v Summary

The Magdalen asylum could function as both a family home and a sanctuary whilst retaining its institutional leitmotiv of redemptive transformation. There were controlling components of a “carceral” environment present in the asylum but there were also incredible friendships formed and demonstrations of unbridled autonomy.

The resistance of several Magdalens makes clear that practices and customs were also transferred between different institutions by human experience. Foucault was aware of such transference when he spoke of the “swarming of disciplinary mechanisms” in society; they flow outwards from the “closed fortresses in which they once functioned”, escaping into new areas of society and infecting other institutions.241 Though Foucault did not theorize how these mechanisms spread, a reasonable answer would be via the

“disciplined” themselves. Many Magdalens arrived at the asylum from the Philadelphia

Hospital, the city almshouse and the city prison; their prior experiences must have shaped the atmosphere of the asylum profoundly.

240 “Advice to a Magdalen”. MSP, BoM Vol.1, May 3rd 1808. 241 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 211.

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If the asylum’s brick walls could not halt Maria Rutter, Abigail Dorman and Eliza

Read, they certainly could not stop earlier memories and expectations. The fledgling

Magdalen asylum was a thoroughly organic institution because its inhabitants shaped it profoundly. Magdalens and managers had a similarly affective and personal relationship.

Many, if not most Magdalens reached the asylum carrying a complex history of prior interactions with additional institutions. Any history that presumes the incommensurability of institutional experience does not recognize the overlapping nature of institutional care in the early 19th century

Finally, the functionalist social control does not seem to account for the uniquely positive philosophy of transformation that existed at the Magdalen asylum. Renewal, regeneration and reaffirmation were central to the asylum’s work and they empowered women who were sexually deviant in the eyes of wider society when little other avenues existed to do so. Perhaps this partly explains why the asylum was so successful in its mission of “reformation”. The sheer number of Magdalens who did leave to work or marry is impressive and too often overlooked when trying to make sense of this institution.

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✜ Conclusion

“Am I happy?” former Magdalen Julia C. asks in a letter shortly before her death in 1848. “No”, she promptly answers in the next line, because “the work of regeneration must take place”. Julia concludes by asking her reader, the Magdalen manager who once cared for her when she was in the asylum, to “remember me” and “accept my sincere thanks for the interest manifested in my welfare. Heaven reward you, man cannot."242

In interpreting what is an exceptionally rare firsthand account of a Magdalen’s thoughts, one wonders how Julia C. would like to be remembered. How do we understand Julia C. and the thousands of other Magdalens whose voice is so absent and faint in the historical record- as daughters of a family?; as converted sisters of the Cross?; as prisoners, or, as something altogether different?

The records of the Philadelphia Magdalen asylum and the city almshouse read as a collection of tragedies, minor and great: privations of old age, debilitating injuries from work, multifarious sickness, appalling domestic violence, failed suicide, drug addiction, familial desertion, rape, infidelity, alcoholism, financial ruin and bad luck. The social ills of antebellum Philadelphia were embedded in the brief vignettes cast by the absorbing and haltingly brief tales that catalogue each resident's story. The burden and breadth of these tragedies reveals great truths about the chaos of social transformation.

242 MSP, BoM Vol. 5, February 1848.

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The pauper and the prostitute were both understood as marginal figures through a moral kaleidoscope of shifting values in the early 19th century. Urban reformers developed a moral vocabulary for deviance that arose principally from the repercussions of the 1817-1822 depression. The new moral lens catalogued the deficiencies of marginal figures based upon their character as indolent, intemperate and ignorant. The theory behind institutional responses adopted this shift by focusing on improving the moral, rather than physical, welfare of the vulnerable. Comparisons of poverty and prostitution have shown they existed as corollaries of marginal behavior in the social consciousness.

Just as the process of social typification created associations between sexual deviance and pauperism in Philadelphia, socioeconomic realities faced by both minorities in urban society and institutional habitation meant that structural ties also existed between these categories of marginality.

However, vast discrepancies existed between the reformatory theory of the ‘moral lens’ and the institutional praxis effectuated in the first three decades of the 19th century.

The experiences of residents in the Philadelphia almshouse are proof of the limited and weak institutional responses to poverty and elucidate the disconnect between reformers and administrators. The deconstruction of the Magdalen asylum into three environments reflects the existence of multiple, and often simultaneous, environments of symbolic meaning and power that were inhabited by asylum residents. These environments were much less contradictory and chaotic than the almshouse. Partly for this reason, the

Magdalen Society was much more a successful organization. It placed a large number of

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Magdalens into secure families and offered a stable refuge to women who were perceived as sexual deviants from “the frowns of a scoffing World". 243

This study has not challenged the presence of any mechanisms intended for social control in antebellum institutions; some element of social control is inherent in any system collectivizing different individuals into a single unit. However, it has found that control mechanisms were ineffectual and did not define the experiences of those within institutions. The monolithic presence of an artificial and historicized dichotomy between a humanitarian sensibility and a controlling hegemony in social control narratives of institutional reform overshadows the complexity of multifarious and sometimes contradictory realities that institutionalizers and the institutionalized co-existed in.

Welfare history, Bruce Dorsey perceptively writes, "has a tendency to sound eerily familiar"244 This can be said of any domain of history but it seems the problem of teleologies is particularly acute in the history of social welfare- in part, because of the great weight this issue carries in the post-Progressive Era for scholars, as we scramble, both morally and intellectually, to understand the social injustices that linger in the 'late modernity' of our present time. Perhaps because of our immediate situation in a disheartening world of coeval prosperity and inequality, it is difficult to consider how

Julia C. would really like to have been remembered. For this reason, we must keep trying.

243 MSP, BoM Vol. 1, February 1803. 244 Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 89.

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Appendix

Figure 1: Magdalen Society Seal; Historical Society of Philadelphia, undated.

Figure 2: Timothy J Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, prostitution, and the commercialization of sex, 1790-1920, (WW Norton & Company, 1992), 58.

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Figure 3: "Alms-House in Spruce Street", 1799. From Smith, Billy. “The Institutional Docket: The Almshouse Daily Occurrence Docket,” in Life in early Philadelphia: documents from the Revolutionary and early national periods edited by Billy Gordon Smith, 29-56. University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 1995.

Figure 4: Magdalen Society, Historical Society of Philadelphia. Undated. This photo of the Asylum can be roughly dated to the turn of the century. Annexes not present here were added to the building in 1916. A children’s playground {of the Franklin Institute} now rests on what was originally the asylum building.

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President William White Vice President Robert Wharton Treasurer John Evans Abraham M. Secretary Garrigues

{Visiting} Standing Committee Robert Ralston Edward " Garrigues " John Letchworth " Robert Coe " John Inskeep Figure 5: Magdalen Society Officers for 1800; collated from MSP, BoM Vol. 1, February 1800.

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Bibliography ¢Primary Sources ¢ A note on primary sources: It was with great excitement that I received generous funding from the History Department to undertake research in Philadelphia. The Magdalen Society Collection located at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania {HSP} is notable for a variety of reasons. First, it has remained much more intact than the records of other comparable institutions. Second, it offers considerable coverage of the organization's operations, spanning annual, monthly and biweekly minutes as well as a variety of institutional ephemera. The Library Company of Philadelphia, next door, complemented the HSP’s strong manuscript holdings with its helpful librarians and treasure trove of printed materials relating to urban institutions. Exigencies of time and inexperience precluded me from delving further into archives to paint a fuller picture of these Magdalens and paupers. However, I hope to return one day to Philadelphia and continue research with these incredible sources. i) Magdalen Society Records at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania:

Magdalen Society of Philadelphia [MSP] :

Minutes of Annual Meetings [AM] (Vol. 1) 1800-1824 Minutes of Annual Meetings [AM] (Vol. 2) 1837-1907

Minutes of the Board of Managers [BoM] (Vol. 1) 1800-1810 Minutes of the Board of Managers [BoM] (Vol. 2) 1810-1818 Minutes of the Board of Managers [BoM] (Vol. 3) 1818-1825 Minutes of the Board of Managers [BoM] (Vol. 4) 1825-1838 Minutes of the Board of Managers [BoM] (Vol. 5) 1838-1850

Matron's Diary (vol. 1) 1829-1834

Miscellaneous: 1884-5 Record of Letters; Undated Photographs of the Magdalen asylum ii) Other Primary Sources:

Anonymous. “The Philanthropist: Or Institutions of Benevolence. By a Pennsylvanian.” Philadelphia: Isaac Peirce, 1813.

Anonymous. “The young lady's Sunday book: A practical manual of the Christian duties of piety, benevolence and self-government.” Philadelphia: Desilver, Thomas and Company, 1836.

Anonymous. “The Young Lady’s Own Book: A Manual of Intellectual Improvement and Moral Deportment.” Philadelphia: Desilver, Thomas and Company, 1836.

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Anonymous. “A Guide to the Stranger or Pocket Companion for the Fancy, containing A List of the Gay Houses and Ladies of Pleasure in the city of brotherly love and sisterly affection.” Philadelphia: 1849.

Collins, Isaac. “A List of the Benevolent Institutions in the City of Philadelphia and their Legal Titles.” Philadelphia: Henry B. Ashmead, 1859.

Committee to Digest a Plan for the More Effectual Relief of the Poor.“Plan for the government of the alms-house.” Philadelphia: Kimber, Conrad and Company: 1805.

Drelincourt, Charles. The Christians Defence Against the Fears of Death. Translated by Marisu D’Assigny. (22 edition) London: J Buckland, 1789.

Frank, E. “Lessons for Young Persons in Humble Life.” York, England: Thomas Wilson and Sons, 1842.

Friend of the Drama. “An enquiry into the condition and influence of the brothels in connection with the theatres of Philadelphia: Intended to awaken the attention of parents and guardians…” Philadelphia, 1834.

Griffiths, Elijah. “An Essay on Ophthalmia, or Inflammation of the Eyes.” Philadelphia: High Maxwell, 1804.

Guardians of the Poor. “To the Senate and the House of Representatives of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.” 1845?

Guardians for the Relief and Employment of the Poor. “The Accounts of the Guardians of the Poor, 1803-1804.” Philadelphia: John Geyer, 1804.

Guardians of the Poor. “The Accounts of the Guardians of the Poor, 1817-1818.” Philadelphia. 1818.

Hartford Evangelical Tract Society. “Happy poverty, or The story of poor blind Ellen. A well authenticated narrative.” Tract Number 20. Hartford, Connecticut: Hudson, 1817.

McNeely, William. “Minutes of the Almshouse visitation Concerning the Charges Against the Directors and Steward of the Institution Containing the Charges and the Testimony.” Doylestown, Pennsylvania: Simeon Siegfried, 1819.

Miscellaneous Remarks on the Police of Boston. Boston: Buckingham: 1814.

Pennsylvanian Society for Discouraging the Use of Ardent Spirits. “Circular.” Philadelphia: John Clarke, 1828.

Philadelphia Fuel Savings Society for the Poor. “Plan of the Fuel Savings Society.” Philadelphia: Joseph Rakestraw, 1821.

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Philadelphia Society for Organizing Charitable Relief and Repressing Mendicancy. “Manual for Visitors Among the Poor (with a directory).” Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1879.

Rowe, G.S. and Billy Smith “Prisoners: The Prisoners for Trial Docket and the Vagrancy Docket,” in Life in early Philadelphia: documents from the Revolutionary and early national periods edited by Billy Gordon Smith, 57-86. University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 1995.

Rules and Regulations for the Internal Government of the Almshouse and House of Employment. Philadelphia: Thomas T. Stiles, 1816.

Rules and Regulations for the Government of the Alms-House in Salem. 1826?

Smith, Billy. “The Institutional Docket: The Almshouse Daily Occurrence Docket,” in Life in early Philadelphia: documents from the Revolutionary and early national periods edited by Billy Gordon Smith, 29-56. University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 1995.

{SPNYC} Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, New York. “Report to the Managers.” New York: Clayton and Kingsland: 1819.

{SPNYC} Society for the Prevention of Pauperism in the City of New York. “Documents Relative to Saving Banks, Intemperance and Lotteries.” New York: E. Conrad: 1819.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. "Memoir on pauperism." Translated by Seymour Drescher, ed. Gertrud Himmelfarb. London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit (1997).

Westcott, Thompson. “The Historic Mansions and Buildings of Philadelphia: With Some Notice of Their Owners and Occupants.” Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1877.

Young, Edward. “Night-Thoughts.” Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1853.

Newspapers: Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser. January 1800- August 1817. Philadelphia.

The Watchman. July 1841. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

¢Secondary Sources ¢ i) Articles/Chapters

Adams, Donald R. "Wage Rates in the Early National Period: Philadelphia, 1785–1830." The Journal of Economic History 28, no. 03 (1968): 404-426.

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Bates, Thomas R. "Gramsci and the Theory of Hegemony." Journal of the History of Ideas 36, no. 2 (1975): 351-366

Blumin, Stuart M. "The hypothesis of middle-class formation in nineteenth-century America: A critique and some proposals." The American Historical Review (1985): 299- 338.

Clement, Priscilla Ferguson. "The Philadelphia Welfare Crisis of the 1820s." Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (1981): 150-165.

Clement, Priscilla Ferguson. "Nineteenth-Century Welfare Policy, Programs, and Poor Women: Philadelphia as a Case Study." Feminist Studies (1992): 35-58.

Cohen, Stanley, and Andrew Scull. "Introduction: social control in History and Sociology." In Social Control and the State: Historical and Comparative Essays, 1-14. Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983.

Curti, Merle. "Tradition and innovation in American philanthropy." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 105, no. 2 (1961): 146-156.

De Cunzo, Lu Ann. "On reforming the “fallen” and beyond: Transforming continuity at the Magdalen Society of Philadelphia, 1845–1916." International Journal of Historical Archaeology 5, no. 1 (2001): 19-43.

Dorsey, Bruce. "Friends Becoming Enemies: Philadelphia Benevolence and the Neglected Era of American Quaker History." Journal of the Early Republic 18, no. 3 (1998): 395-428.

Farr, Gail E. “Philadelphia Overseers of the Poor.” In Invisible Philadelphia: Community Through Voluntary Organizations, edited by Jean Barth Toll, and Mildred S. Gillam, 281-283. Philadelphia: Atwater Kent Museum, 1995.

Forsythe, Davis H. "Friends' Almshouse in Philadelphia." Bulletin of Friends' Historical Association 16, no. 1 (1927): 16-25.

Gilfoyle, Timothy J. "Strumpets and Misogynists: Brothel 'Riots' and the Transformation of Prostitution in Antebellum New York City." New York History 68.1 (1987): 44-65.

Grob, Gerald N. "Reflections on the history of social policy in America." Reviews in American History (1979): 293-306.

Haviland, Margaret Morris. "Beyond Women's Sphere: Young Quaker Women and the Veil of Charity in Philadelphia, 1790-1810." The William and Mary Quarterly 51, no. 3 (1994): 419-446.

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Hessinger, Rodney. "Victim of Seduction or Vicious Woman?: Conceptions of the Prostitute at the Philadelphia Magdalen Society, 1800-1850." Pennsylvania History (1999): 201-222.

Ignatieff, Michael. "State, civil society, and total institutions: A critique of recent social histories of punishment." Crime and Justice (1981): 153-192.

Janowitz, Morris. "Sociological theory and social control." American Journal of sociology (1975): 82-108.

Klebaner, Benjamin J. "The Home Relief Controversy in Philadelphia, 1782-1861." Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (1954): 413-423.

Kohl, Lawrence Frederick. "The Concept of Social Control and the History of Jacksonian America." Journal of the Early Republic (1985): 21-34.

Lindenmeyr, Adele. "The Ethos of charity in Imperial Russia." Journal of Social History (1990): 679-694.

Luckin, Bill. “Towards a Social History of Institutionalization.” Social History 8 (1983): 87-94.

Lyons, Clare. “Discipline, Sex, and the Republican Self,” in the Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, edited by Edward G. Gray and Jane Kamensky, 560-577. Oxford University Press, 2013. van der Meulen , Emily. "Moral Panic and the New York Magdalen Society: Nineteenth Century Prostitution and the Moral Reform Movement." MP: Online Feminist Journal July (2008): 27- 38.

Miller, Fredric. “Introduction” In Invisible Philadelphia: Community Through Voluntary Organizations, edited by Jean Barth Toll and Mildred S. Gillam, 3-13. Philadelphia: Atwater Kent Museum, 1995.

Miller, Jacquelyn C. "An ‘Uncommon Tranquility of Mind’: Emotional Self-Control and the Construction of a Middle-Class Identity in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia." Journal of Social History (1996): 129-148.

Montgomery, David. "The shuttle and the cross: Weavers and artisans in the Kensington riots of 1844." Journal of Social History 5.4 (1972): 411-446.

Nash, Stanley. "Prostitution and charity: The Magdalen Hospital, a case study." Journal of Social History (1984): 617-628.

Rezneck, Samuel. "The Depression of 1819-1822, A Social History." The American Historical Review 39, no. 1 (1933): 28-47.

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Riegel, Robert E. "Changing American attitudes toward prostitution (1800-1920)." Journal of the History of Ideas (1968): 437-452.

Rosenberg, Charles E. "Sexuality, class and role in 19th-century America." American Quarterly 25.2 (1973): 131-153.

Ruggles, Steven. "Fallen Women: The Inmates of the Magdalen Society Asylum of Philadelphia, 1836-1908." Journal of Social History (1983): 65-82.

Smith, Billy G., and Cynthia Shelton. "The Daily Occurrence Docket of the Philadelphia Almshouse: Selected Entries, 1800–1804." Pennsylvania History (1985): 183-205.

Teeters, Negley K. "The early days of the Magdalen Society of Philadelphia." The Social Service Review (1956): 158-167.

Welter, Barbara. "The cult of true womanhood: 1820-1860." American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 151-174.

ii) Books

Alexander, John K. Render them submissive: Responses to poverty in Philadelphia, 1760- 1800. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980.

D'Antonio, Patricia. Founding Friends: Families, Staff, and Patients at the Friends Asylum in Early Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. Lehigh University Press, 2006.

Boyer, Paul S. Urban masses and moral order in America, 1820-1920. Harvard University Press, 1992.

Carlisle, Marcia Roberta. Prostitutes and their reformers in nineteenth century Philadelphia. PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, 1982.

Cohen, Patricia Cline, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Horowitz. The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York. University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Cohen, Patricia Cline. The Murder of Helen Jewett. New York: Random House, 2010.

Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780- 1835. Yale University Press, 1997.

Davis, Nanette J. Sociological constructions of deviance: Perspectives and issues in the field. WC Brown Company, 1980.

Davis, Susan G. Parades and power: Street theatre in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986.

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Dorsey, Bruce Allen. City of brotherly love: religious benevolence, gender, and reform in Philadelphia, 1780-1844. PhD dissertation, Brown University, 1993.

Dorsey, Bruce. Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City. Cornell University Press, 2002.

Downes, David M., and Paul Elliott Rock. Understanding deviance: A guide to the sociology of crime and rule-breaking. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Press, 1995.

Gilfoyle, Timothy J. City of Eros: New York City, prostitution, and the commercialization of sex, 1790-1920. WW Norton & Company, 1992.

Innes, Martin. Understanding social control: Crime and social order in late modernity. McGraw-Hill International, 2003.

Katz, Michael B. In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A social history of welfare in America. Basic Books, 1996.

Klebaner, Benjamin Joseph. Public Poor Relief in America, 1790-1860. New York: Arno Press, 1976.

Laurie, Bruce. Working people of Philadelphia, 1800-1850. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980.

Lyons, Clare A. Sex among the rabble: an intimate history of gender & power in the age of revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830. Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 2006.

Marshall, Helen, Kathy Douglas, and Desmond McDonnell. Deviance and Social Control: Who Rules? Oxford University Press, 2007.

Nash, Gary B. Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840. Harvard University Press, 1988.

Poynter, John Riddoch. Society and pauperism: English ideas on poor relief, 1795-1834. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969.

Pugh, David G. Sons of liberty: The masculine mind in nineteenth-century America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983.

Rothman, David J. The Discovery of the Asylum. Transaction Publishers, 1971.

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Ryan, Mary P. Women in Public: Between banners and ballots, 1825-1880. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

Schneider, John C. Detroit and the problem of order, 1830-1880: A geography of crime, riot, and policing. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1980.

Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846. Oxford University Press, 1992.

Teeters, Negley K. They Were in Prison. Philadelphia: John C. Winston Company, 1937.

Thompson, Edward Palmer. The making of the English working class. London: IICA, 1980.

Simpson, Henry. The Lives of Eminent Philadelphians, Now deceased collected from original and authentic sources. Philadelphia: William Brotherhead, 1859.

Thompson, Edward Palmer. The Making of the English Working Class. London: IICA, 1980.

Warner, Sam Bass. The Private City: Philadelphia in three periods of its growth. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987.

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