Poverty

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POVERTY

Historians have disagreed since the 1960s about the extent of poverty in early America. Social historians have eroded the traditional vision of colonial America as a land of opportunity with grim demographic studies of the widening gap between rich and poor in the eighteenth century and detailed examinations of the lives of ordinary people, indentured servants, and slaves. Late-twentieth-century scholarship has offered a vision of early America in which increasing population decreased the size and viability of landholdings, and promoted impoverished tenancy, especially in the South, as a lifelong state rather than a temporary condition to be corrected by hard work and frugality or moving to the frontier. Ideological conflict among historians is not dissimilar to colonial and early republican ambivalence about economic and political independence, civic responsibility, and the possibility of economic mobility and social advancement for the new country's citizens. The concern of early Americans about the proper shape and character of colonial and early republican society was reflected in debates about the moral character of applicants for poor relief and increasing interest in making distinctions between the poor worthy of support ("worthy" or "deserving" poor) and those who required moral reform as well as public assistance ("vicious" or "unworthy" poor).

When English people first moved to the colonies, the problems of helpless poor citizens, unemployment, and the transient poor moved with them, as did ideas about addressing these difficulties. The colonies modeled their earliest relief practice on the English Poor Laws. Township boards of overseers administered relief, and while relief legislation and administration policies were fairly uniform across counties and within regions, individual communities tended to administer relief on a case-by-case basis, with considerable range in the extent to which they enforced residence and conduct requirements, allowed visitors, and allowed inmates to leave the grounds. In addition to variation between communities, individual towns and townships sometimes switched from "putting out" paupers individually to boarding them collectively and then back again, depending on how many paupers required support.

collective and individual approaches

In the collective system all paupers not receiving "outdoor" relief (assistance in cash or goods given to paupers or the relatives caring for them) were boarded in a house rented or purchased by the township. A member of the township board or someone hired for that purpose, usually the individual providing the lowest bid for cost of the paupers' support for the year, administered the almshouse. In exchange for a set sum, the steward or overseer provided all food, clothing, and shelter for the town's paupers for the year. In some cases medical care was contracted for separately. The able-bodied generally worked on the almshouse premises or on the overseer's farm. Amounts to be refunded to the local government should any of the paupers die during the course of the year were agreed upon in advance.

Under the "putting out" system the paupers were assigned individually to private households, preferably to those of relatives or friends; some households boarded two paupers at once. These "putting out" agreements were renegotiated every year, which could result in individual paupers being shifted from household to household. These arrangements existed side-by-side with cash payments to individuals or to their families on a quarterly basis as outdoor relief.

growing numbers of poor

By the mid-eighteenth century, poverty was becoming a matter of increasing public concern: increasing numbers of poor people receiving public assistance in cities were joined by growing numbers of dependent poor in nonurban areas. While private charity offered by individuals and by benevolent and religious organizations continued to grow in the eighteenth century, such aid could not keep pace with the growing number of poor people in need. Worse still from an administrator's perspective, many of the people swelling the relief rolls (and prompting increased poor taxes) were not the traditional "worthy" poor (widows, orphans, the sick, the elderly, the disabled, the insane); instead, they were able-bodied but unemployed. Many of these able-bodied unemployed were members of a growing class of landless men who had failed to inherit or acquire land and were forced to hire themselves out as tenants or unskilled laborers. Because women's ability to own property and act as independent economic entities was restricted by both custom and law, and because women were primarily responsible for child rearing, women were more vulnerable to destitution than men. Thus, another growing category of applicants for relief was women whose husbands had died or abandoned them and who were unable to secure work or subsist on assistance from friends and relatives. Transients in need presented a growing problem for overseers of the poor in both cities and non-urban communities throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. The care of transients strained existing relief resources, especially in periods of epidemic disease such as the yellow fever that devastated Philadelphia in 1741 and 1793, and ravaged Philadelphia, Boston and New York periodically through the 1790s. The inadequacy of existing social welfare resources, especially in urban areas, prompted the creation of poor relief policies that stressed legal residence as a requirement for receiving relief. Paupers who did not qualify as residents could be warned out of town in rural areas, or transported to their counties of residence in order to make room for qualifying members of the community or destitute immigrants. Conflicts like King William's War (1689-1697), the Seven Years' War (1755-1763), and the American Revolution temporarily slowed high rates of immigration, but produced widows, orphans, and veterans that needed care and contributed to the instability of local economies.

an institutional response

By the late seventeenth century, cities such as Boston (by 1685) and New York (1730s) began to turn to institutions as a more effective way to care for the growing numbers of urban poor. Communities adopted institution-based relief for two reasons: first, because institutional care could be more easily monitored for efficient administration, and second, because institutions offered a setting within which (ideally) the lives and characters of relief recipients could be shaped according to prevailing ideas of appropriate behavior. The first almshouses were usually houses rented or purchased with money from the poor taxes, and poor people were housed there under the care of an overseer and matron. In many communities (New York City's surrounding counties, for example) these poorhouses coexisted with the older "outdoor" relief system.

Poorhouses were important parts of the political, economic, and social lives of their communities. In addition to aiding the poor, poorhouses served as employers for many of the working poor who would otherwise have become inmates, conducted business with their neighbors, and were lightning rods for controversies over the expenditure of public funds, the outcome of local elections, responses to epidemics, and other issues of public concern.

By the mid-1830s, larger cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia and the towns and cities in their environs had moved to almshouses as their primary response to the problems of poverty in an economically and socially unstable environment. Almshouses occupied an important place in the imaginations of communities throughout the nineteenth century, and they played an important role in the definition of community identity. As places of refuge and employment, sources of object lessons and the temporary homes of objects of pity, almshouses appeared in paintings amid bucolic rural scenery, were embroidered on children's samplers, and were both praised and vilified in the local press. Visitors conducted personal business with the institutions' overseers, evaluated the standards of care for inmates, observed the expenditure of public funds, and contemplated the fragility of material prosperity.

The shift to institutional care for the poor coincided in much of the country with a shift to institutional care for the insane and the construction of the first state penitentiaries. An institution-based system would remain the standard for poor relief for the rest of the nineteenth century and beyond.