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UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title American maritime industry and a charity of wages, 1790- 1850 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/102152ms Author Eyring, Mary Kathleen Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO American Maritime Industry and a Charity of Wages, 1790-1850 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Literature by Mary Kathleen Eyring Committee in charge: Professor Nicole Tonkovich, Chair Professor Michael Davidson Professor Sara Johnson Professor Rachel Klein Professor Kathryn Shevelow 2012 Copyright Mary Kathleen Eyring, 2012 All rights reserved. The Dissertation of Mary Kathleen Eyring is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: Chair University of California, San Diego 2012 iii DEDICATION To my mother, whose voice I can still hear in the lines of the books we loved. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page…………………………………………………………………….. iii Dedication…………………………………………………………………………. iv Table of Contents………………………………………………………………….. v Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………. vi Vita.………………………………………………………………………………... ix Abstract.…………………………………………………………………………… x Introduction: American Maritime Industry and a Charity of Wages, 1790-1850..................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: “To be the medium of her charity”: The Performance of Vicarious Charity During Philadelphia’s Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793………….. 51 Chapter 2: To “make them a useful part of the human race”: The Benevolent Education of Maritime Laborers at America’s First Schools for the Deaf…………...................................................................... 115 Chapter 3: “A field of usefulness seemed spread out before me”: Nancy Prince and the Economics of Evangelizing in Postemancipation Jamaica…..….... 178 Chapter 4: “A Charity of Wages”: Sarah J. Hale and the Business of Maritime Benevolence.………………………………………………………………. 232 Conclusion: The City of Brotherly Love in 1840: A Charitable Workplace Transformed.................…………………………………………………..... 282 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………..... 293 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS From the moment she strode across a room crowded with her colleagues and new students to welcome me to the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego, Nicole Tonkovich has made me feel like a valued, informed, well-connected, and capable member of an inclusive academic community. As a professor, editor, and the chair of my dissertation committee, she’s displayed an incredible knack for nudging me in the direction of clearer and more responsible scholarship and then letting me believe I’ve arrived at it myself. She’s given me not only the confidence that I can succeed professionally, but also the experiences and tools that make success likely. I join the host of students who owe their achievements in academia and their sense of pride and belonging in higher education largely to her guidance and support. I am grateful to the other professors on my committee, Michael Davidson, Kathryn Shevelow, Sara Johnson, and Rachel Klein, for their similarly valuable contributions to my education and to this dissertation. Each has shown a willingness to meet with me, to read carefully over my work, and to offer trenchant and useful critiques. Even more remarkable, given the demands on their time, is that none of them has ever made me feel like this support has been an imposition in the least. I could not have completed this dissertation without their generosity and expertise. A number of people have supported my research at libraries and universities where I’ve collected source materials. Rob Melton at the Social Sciences and Humanities Library at UCSD helped me locate a wealth of information on nineteenth-century women writers stored practically at my fingertips. Nic Butler, the manager of the Charleston Archive at the Charleston County Public Library, shared his encyclopedic knowledge of vi everything published in and about Charleston and located many of the sources upon which sections of this dissertation depend. I’m grateful to Nicole Dittrich at the Special Collections Research Center at Syracuse University Library for lending me assistance and sharing her talent for deciphering illegible handwriting from centuries past. I also appreciate the staff at the New York Historical Society, Michael Pittman of New York University’s Bobst Library, the staff at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and Linda August at the Library Company of Philadelphia for their time and knowledge. I’ve benefitted immensely from the presentations, discussions, and criticism offered by my colleagues at The Atlantic World Workshop at NYU. And I owe sincere thanks to the editor, editorial board, and consultants at Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers and to the members of the Southern California Society for the Study of American Women Writers for their commitment to publishing extraordinary scholarship and encouraging me to follow suit. Chapter 2, in part, has been accepted for publication and will appear in a special issue of Legacy 2013. Eyring, Mary Kathleen, University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Closer to home, I’ve been supported by individuals who’ve let me blur all reasonable distinctions among friend, editor, family member, and research assistant. Melissa Milewski read and commented extensively on chapters of this dissertation even as she worked assiduously to finish her own book. Kaeli Andersen provided me access to New York City’s secret sanctuaries of study, made even more distinctive by her warm and engaging presence. Lisa Thomas has been a good editor, a good sport, and a great friend. Roger and Kathy Carter made it possible for me to shuttle between diverse parts of the country as I researched and wrote. My parents gave me everything worth having, vii and then taught me to use reading and writing to make sense of it all. My siblings and their spouses cheered me on as I worked. Finally, my most heartfelt thanks go to Jacob Carter, who, had he known the long hours of technical assistance, driving to archives hither and yon, hauling books to and from various libraries, wrestling with unwieldy reels of microfilm, and tinkering with pictures, slides, and photocopies that this adventure of dissertating would require of him, might never have urged me to apply to UCSD in the first place. But knowing him, he probably would. viii VITA 2002-2006 Bachelor of Arts in English, Brigham Young University 2007-2009 Master of Arts in Literature, University of California, San Diego 2007-2012 Doctor of Philosophy in Literature, University of California, San Diego SELECT PUBLICATIONS “To ‘make them a useful part of the human race’: The Benevolent Education of Maritime Laborers at America’s First Schools for the Deaf.” Legacy, forthcoming. “The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West.” The Encyclopedia of Jewish-American Literature. Ed. Gloria L. Cronin and Alan L. Berger. New York: Facts on File, 2009. ix ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION American Maritime Industry and a Charity of Wages, 1790-1850 by Mary Kathleen Eyring Doctor of Philosophy in Literature University of California, San Diego, 2012 Professor Nicole Tonkovich, Chair This dissertation studies organized charity work as it was performed in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Charleston, and Kingston, Jamaica from the last decade of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. I study the writings of Charles Brockden Brown, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, Sarah Pogson Smith, Nancy Prince, and Sarah Josepha Hale alongside other primary and secondary texts to show the mutually sustaining bond between benevolence and other forms of capitalistic labor of this period, particularly literary production. I argue that charity work functioned during the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as an innovative and profitable form x of labor that allowed marginalized individuals to contravene the strictures surrounding race, gender, and class that determined a laborer’s earning potential within the American workforce. My research closely analyzes a variety of literary and historical sources to demonstrate that women, people of color, the disabled, and other disenfranchised groups carefully positioned themselves along circuits of exchange in a global economy because they recognized that charity was not a hobby but a business, successful only to the extent that it adapted itself to viable economic models and responded rapidly to shifts in larger market trends. xi Introduction: American Maritime Industry and a Charity of Wages, 1790-1850 When Sara Josepha Hale, the Boston-based editor of the Ladies Magazine, founded the Seaman’s Aid Society in 1833, her charity eschewed the one-sided distribution of alms—the model then operative among the city’s impoverished—and instead embedded itself in the profit-and-loss structure of a competitive business. Under the management of the Society’s leaders, seamen’s wives and children sewed clothing for sailors to be sold at a store they also staffed. Their compensation, as Hale conceived of it, was a way to refigure alms as “a charity of wages” awarded according to the performance of the supplicants (“Extracts from the Annual Report” 1836). Hale’s social influence and earning potential as an editor rose in direct
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