Ordinary People

In and Out of Poverty in the Gilded Age

David Wagner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317254935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

David Wagner explores the lives of poor people during the three decades after the Civil War, using a unique treasure of biographies of people who were (at one point in time) inmates in a large almshouse, combined with genealogical and other official records to follow their later lives. Ordinary People develops a more fluid picture of "poverty" as people's lives change over the course of time.

ONE

Ordinary People

“Let it be remembered that a large proportion of these poor people, called ‘paupers’ by the newspapers and officials, are honest working men and women, the profit of whose toil goes to make up the fortunes—the millions—of the few whose costly equipage jostle the starving mechanic in the same street.”

—William Sylvis, nineteenth-century labor leader

In every era, those who are labeled “poor” tend to be viewed as frozen in time and space as a permanent class. In the nineteenth century, those at the bottom of the social order were variously known as: paupers; the indolent, vicious, and intemperate; the dangerous classes; the rabble; or, as the 1880 census labeled them, “the defective, dependent and delinquent classes.” One of the important opportunities of historical research is the ability to explore the lives of ordinary people who were classified as “poor” at one point in time and gain some measure of a longer look at their lives. The following seven people—a native-born American orphan who was placed out of his family, an African American born in the South arriving in Massachusetts, an Irish immigrant to America with family problems, an Irish-Canadian immigrant who had a child out of wedlock, a French immigrant and her children fleeing domestic violence, another Irish immigrant who lost his leg working on the railroad, and an elderly native New Englander who lost his money—all hit “rock bottom” and were admitted to a poorhouse between the end of the Civil War and the mid-1890s. As different as each person was, they shared the characteristic of being ordinary people.

FRANK CROSS

Frank Cross was a ten-year-old boy made homeless in 1880 when his father, Solomon, was imprisoned for nine months in the House of Correction in South Boston “for obtaining goods under false pretenses.” Frank was born in a small town in rural Maine but grew up in the growing industrial center of Lewiston where his father was a black-smith. When Frank was a little boy, his mother Etta deserted the family. His father migrated to the Boston area where he became a grocer. As in most cases of orphans or young children of prisoners, Frank was moved from the poorhouse and was “placed out” or “bound over” to a farm family where he would labor in return for board. These placements were sometimes exploitative. We know that by age 17, Frank was a laborer in the Boston area. He then married Mary Haney, who was from a family affluent enough that she did not have to work. Frank and Mary had two children and lived in the Boston area throughout the rest of their lives. Frank tried his hand at a clothing business in the first decade of the twentieth century, but later worked as a mechanic and owned a home in Wakefield, Massachusetts, about twenty miles outside of Boston. His son followed him in becoming a mechanic.

ROBERT H. DELANEY

Robert H Delaney was an African American boy who was born in Washington, D.C. His father, Thomas, was a hotel waiter who owned some property, and his mother was Josephine. The youngest of five children, several years after his father’s death, Robert headed north to Massachusetts. As a young teenager he got a job at the Harvard (University) Dining Saloon, which employed many African Americans. After Robert was admitted to the almshouse in 1875, the agents noted “he had friends William H. Jones, C. W. Turner, and George Simmons all of Washington [who are] now employed in the Harvard Dining Saloon.” After a short stay at the almshouse, Robert would later return to Washington, where he continued to work as a waiter and live with his family. He married Laura Moran, a native of Georgia, in 1885. When found in records later, he seemed to have separated or divorced from Laura and had moved to New Jersey where he worked in Atlantic City as a waiter and lived with his mother, now in her seventies and listed as a nurse. Robert remarried in the early 1900s and was last found as a hotel waiter in Paterson, New Jersey.

BRIDGET HENNESSEY FERGUSON

Bridget Hennessey was born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1840. Like millions of her fellow countrymen who fled the abject poverty of Ireland, she came to America, landing in Boston in September 1858 aboard the ship Wilbur Fiske. As was also typical of many immigrants, her family was divided, with her father, William, staying in Ireland and dying there, while her mother, Margaret, came to America. Her siblings’ history is not known, but may too have been divided by the Atlantic. In 1864, she married James Ferguson, a German immigrant, in a Roman Catholic ceremony in Boston.

In 1873, Bridget, now the mother of four children, entered the poorhouse complaining of her husband abusing her. According to her interview the troubles began the year before, and “she has had more or less trouble with her husband since. She claims that he sold her furniture and he still treats her badly. He pinches her out the doors occasionally.” Bridget stated that neither she nor her husband were heavy drinkers. Interestingly, the children were left at the home in Boston with James. The examining agents described Bridget obliquely as “a trifle flighty now but one should not call her insane.”

Bridget (nee Hennessey) Ferguson returned to her husband and they had five more children together. James, earlier described as having a job at the Customs House, was by 1880 a porter in a leather shop, which must have certainly made it challenging to support the family. James died in 1896 in Boston, at the age of 58, and Bridget died the following year at 57 in Taunton, Massachusetts, an industrial center in southeastern Massachusetts.

AUGUSTINE JACQUOIT

Augustine Jacquoit (maiden name not known) was a French immigrant to America, arriving in New York in October 1888 at the age of fifteen. The next year she married Julius Jacquoit, also a native of France. They gave birth to their first child, Pauline, in the Western Massachusetts Berkshires town of Great Barrington, and later had two other children, Louis and Julius Junior. Some time after they met, Julius evidently began to batter Augustine, and in 1893, Julius was sentenced to four months in the Pittsfield, Massachusetts, jail for assaulting his wife. Augustine entered the poorhouse with her three children, though we do not know whether this was for reasons of physical shelter or for other assistance, such as medical care for her children. At some point in the 1890s, both Louis and Julius Junior died. Augustine would live with her one remaining child, Pauline, the rest of her life. She would work as a cook, first in Great Barrington and later in Albany, New York, where she was also the keeper of a lodging house. Pauline found work as a typist and stenographer. We do not know for sure what became of Julius Senior. T he most likely person found i n censuses was a man with a similar name in the small industrial city of Torrington, Connecticut. If this is he, he remarried and started a new family, and worked throughout his life as a machinist.

KATE JOY

Kate Joy is typical of many women who were punished in the nine-teenth century for having an out-of-wedlock child. Born on the barren Canadian island of Newfoundland, her family was of Irish descent. She came to the northern Massachusetts town of Newburyport in the late 1840s. Kate was the sixth of nine children. Her father, John Joy, was a seaman and fisherman, and her mother, Mary, kept house. Her father was born in Ireland, while Mary was born in Canada. As was common in the nineteenth century, the entire family worked from an early age, and in 1860, for example, all the girls were working in mills, while the older sons were fisherman sailing out of Newburyport. The Joys must have done relatively well as they owned their own home for awhile. However, upon the death of John Joy, the family had to sell the house. In 1867, Kate was admitted to a poorhouse after discovering she was pregnant. She reported that the father of her child was one Tim Sul-livan, a 23-year-old sailor from the nearby northeastern Massachusetts town of Amesbury. As did many unmarried mothers, Kate reported that the father was “now off” (the father would have faced arrest and prosecution under the law at this time and made to pay support for the woman and child; whether the father had indeed “skipped town” or whether his location was actually known to the mother we cannot know). On July 1, 1867, Kate was sentenced to the Massachusetts workhouse, which more closely resembled a penal institution than an almshouse. This entailed harsh work and discipline and was meant explicitly to punish miscreants guilty of drunkenness, adultery, fornication, petty theft, and even idleness. We know that, as of 1870, Kate was still an inmate at the workhouse. This is quite an unusual length of time to be there, indicative either of another conviction which sent Kate there after her first sentence or perhaps an assessment of her mental status as incompetent. The agents referred to her as “foolish almost,” a presumed judgment of mental retardation.

DAVID RING

David Ring was an Irish immigrant who landed in New York City in 1850 on the ship Clara Wheeler. He married his wife, Johanna, in 1854 and settled down in Salem, Massachusetts, the old seaport city about thirty miles north of Boston. Like most Irish males of this period, he had few opportunities but to be a “laborer,” which served as an all purpose catchall term to describe unskilled workers who were forced to do almost anything manual. As with many Irish laborers he worked on the vast network of railroads beginning to cross the nation. Unfortunately, the growth of the railroads, as with much of the American economy, left behind thousands of injured, maimed, and even dead workers. Railroad employment additionally relied on housing thousands of workers in railroad camps with poor health and sanitary conditions, and many workers were misled into coming for work that did not exist. In 1860, David was one the railroad’s victims, losing a leg while he was loading stone onto a rail car on the Eastern Railroad. Unable to work anymore, he was lucky enough to be sup-ported by his wife, who ran a small store. In 1873, however, his wife fell ill and broke her leg and was unable to care for him. She also was reported “to have used up all her means.” David Ring entered the poorhouse that year. He did find sympathy from a member of the Overseers of the Poor in his native Salem (those officials responsible for administering local relief for three hundred years of American history) who described him as “a clever, old unfortunate man. Give him all the liberty you can.” Ring was 68 years old at the time.

JOHN F. WYMAN

John F. Wyman was the tenth of eleven children of William and Mary Gibson Wyman, members of an old New England family. According to his interview on entering the poorhouse, John carried “a complete Family Record back to 1752, [with a] settlement in old Lunenberg, now a part of the city of Fitchburg.” Born in 1805 in Walpole, New Hampshire, an old rural settlement, John, like many nineteenth-century Americans, was mobile and by eighteen had traveled to Massachusetts, by twenty-five out west to the Erie Canal area, and by thirty-five further west to Michigan. John married Caroline Elizabeth Metcalf in 1833, and by 1850 they had a family of five daughters. John became a merchant in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with a respectable $1,500 worth of property. At some point John caught the revivalist fever of the times and “traveled in various places [in the] West lecturing on Temperance and Phrenology.” (Temperance was the budding anti-liquor movement of the time, while the study of phrenology relied on the analysis of skull characteristics to determine mental or moral characteristics). John evidently left his family, presumably to lecture or proselytize, and worked on farms in Michigan and Massachusetts. When John was sixty-eight, he reported that he was robbed of $4,300 while traveling from Lowell, Massachusetts, to Boston. According to his interview in 1874, he “was once worth $40,000, but lost his property by endorsing the paper of a friend and selling his stock in a variety store on credit.” At seventy years old, John entered the almshouse and apparently remained there until he died at 78 on October 11, 1882. His wife, Caroline, died in 1861, and his daughters were in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the late nineteenth century.

THE FLUIDITY OF POVERTY

With the possible exception of Wyman (and whether he accumulated the amount of funds he claims may be dubious), what is most striking is the ordinariness of the “inmates” (as they were then called) of one of America’s largest almshouses. Sadly, John Wyman and (perhaps) David Ring ended their days there. It is also possible that Kate Joy died in the workhouse, given the early life expectancy of the time and the high death rate at these institutions. Yet for Frank Cross, Thomas Delaney, Bridget Ferguson, and Augustine Jacquoit the harsh stigma of poverty and the poorhouse did not prevent them from leading what appears to be ordinary lives after leaving the poorhouse, at least as far as occupations and family constellations are concerned. Nor had the Joy, Wyman, and Ring families by any means always been “poor”; the Wyman and Joy families had been homeowners, while the Rings had run a store.

To say these and other poor people are “ordinary” people is not to deny the tragedy that is poverty nor that the poor were (and are) victims of economic events such as unemployment, as well as poor working conditions and poor living conditions which follow from poverty, from inferior housing and inadequate diet to street violence to more reported family violence. They are also the victims of how the political and social system distributes its surplus. However, a focus on poverty as victimhood not only—as so many have now argued—defeats any sense of people’s own control or “agency,” as academics like to say. It also, as importantly, can obscure the fact that most poor people, if never affluent, are part of a broader class of working people, who either do not make enough money or suffer losses of jobs or other reversals that prevent them from being judged as “average” working people for a period of time. This is to suggest that, economic depressions aside, few people go for years without work and without participation in both the wage and consumer culture of capitalism. While clearly some groups of people are far more vulnerable to poverty than others, predicting poverty in the cases above would not have been easy and was dependent on a complex mix of social, economic, and individual circumstances.

Specifically, there would be almost no way to predict from their earlier lives that Kate Joy, David Ring, or John Wyman would end up in an almshouse or workhouse. Kate Joy’s father was a property holder and taxpayer. His daughter’s apparent fate may have been a result of the simple act of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy or perhaps involved other factors (her being “foolish almost”). While we know many elderly people ended up destitute at this time, there would be no reason to predict that Wyman or Ring in particular would. Wyman was a property holder and Ring a storekeeper at one point. The deep depression that began in 1873 may well have been a breaking point for both of them and their ability to support themselves (or their family’s ability to support them). In a similar vein, we could not predict that Frank Cross, an orphan who was bound out, or Augustine Jacquoit, an immigrant woman with a family who was assaulted by her husband and entered an almshouse, would each later own a home, not a common thing for most workers in the U.S. until after World War II. Since Cross and Jacquoit were both relatively young when they entered the almshouse (ten for Cross in 1880 and twenty-two for Jacquoit in 1893), they grew to later adulthood in a relatively more prosperous period in New England of the early twentieth century, in which there was more social mobility. Perhaps this in part provides an answer.

Moreover, “poverty” turns out to be a complex thing to define, consisting of at least three valid definitions. Most people think of poverty as an absolute monetary amount necessary to support oneself and/or one’s family. Determining such levels is highly contested, and most social scientists believe the current U.S. “poverty line” is set at an inadequately low rate. Still, one can develop a measure of necessities and decide on a more liberal poverty line. Depending, of course, on what exact level of income or assets our seven people above had at any time, they may have gone in and out of being in poverty. Another definition of poverty is a relative one. This definition would suggest poverty exists on a comparative basis in which individuals and families, and, in fact, the whole society thinks of deprivation based on the average consumption and living standards of their area and their time. This too is an important measure of social life. You may make $20,000 as an individual in 2007, which would place you far above today’s poverty level, and that would be the case even with the more liberal poverty lines some advocate. Yet you may feel absolutely poor, being unable to buy an automobile, afford much of a vacation, or perhaps purchase the latest computer, television, and high tech equipment. While once seen as luxuries, most of these items are now thought of as necessities. By relative measures, certainly some of our seven people above appear to have been above the relative level of the times, particularly when including the home ownership information.

Another definition of poverty that is underexplored is the legally ascribed status that poverty had until relatively recently, and which arguably has some carry-overs in our current time. From the first Colonial settlements in America until the Warren Court’s striking down of certain regulations in the 1960s, poverty had a legal meaning. To be a “pauper,” one who was destitute and receiving public aid, was to lose all rights, including usually the right to vote in elections. This is to remind the reader that all seven of our ordinary people lost whatever rights they had not only while on relief but, although not always enforced, potentially for years afterward. Also, from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century, legal poverty entailed the laws of settlement, which privileged those who had lived in one place steadily and paid taxes such as property and poll taxes. For women, who of course could not vote during most of this time period, their settlement was usually established through their husbands or fathers. To have a “settlement” meant legally being eligible to the rights of citizenship of the town or city. The seven people profiled above would have known the ramifications of their status well. By this measure a different look at poverty can be gleaned. For as long as Bridget Ferguson lived with her husband, who had a settlement, and as long as Kate Joy lived with her father who had a settlement, they would not be denied town assistance. John Wyman had a settlement in Michigan, but when he came to Massachusetts, he had none. David Ring had a settlement in Salem, but Frank Cross’s father did not pay enough taxes to have a settlement when Frank was admitted. While seemingly arcane, the legally ascribed nature of poverty is critical to examining poverty in America before the 1930s. The h...