In the Web of Class

Delinquents and Reformers in Boston, 1810s-1930s

Eric C. Schneider

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1993
• ISBN:
  9780814788783
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

"An analytic overview of the history of social welfare and juvenile justice in Boston..[Schneider] traces cogently the origins, development, and ultimate failure of Protestant and Catholic reformers' efforts to ameliorate working-class poverty and juvenile delinquency."
— Choice

"Anyone who wants to understand why America's approach to juvenile justice doesn't work should read In the Web of Class."
—Michael B. Katz,University of Pennsylvania

PART I
The Creation of Private and Public Charity

IN the early nineteenth century, reformers in both the United States and England sought to redefine the relationship of the poor to society. Welfare reform in both countries reflected the ideas of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, as reformers sought to cut subsidies to the poor and bring charity in line with the demands of the free market. Malthus, with his claim of having discovered the laws of population growth, was particularly influential. Relief, he argued, sustained the poor artificially and kept them from learning self-discipline—especially delayed marriage and reproduction—or from suffering the misery and famine that were the consequences of overpopulation. In England, the revision of the Poor Laws in 1834 limited outdoor relief (aid given to the poor in their homes), established the poorhouse with a regimen of strict discipline as the centerpiece of welfare policy, and announced the doctrine of “less eligibility.” In the United States, most notably in New York and Massachusetts, public commissions on welfare promoted reforms along the same lines.¹

Relief certainly seemed in need of reorganization. Boston, like the rest of Massachusetts, based its system of poor relief on the Elizabethan poor law, in which aid was linked to “settlement” (each community was responsible only for its own poor). However, this system did not work particularly well, even in the eighteenth century, as the surplus population in a stagnant agricultural economy moved about in search of work. Colonial wars also unloosed streams of refugees, who had little inclination to return home but who possessed no legal settlement in Boston. The municipal almshouse served as the refuge of the poor, but it was itself a problem. The almshouse mixed the aged, the young, the ill, and the insane together with able-bodied beggars and drunks, who presumably could work, and inmates constantly escaped. Other indigents received aid in their homes, but Boston’s Overseers of the Poor were popularly elected and dispensed charity as a form of patronage, making a careful examination into the conditions of recipients unlikely. In sum, it was a costly, chaotic system, poorly designed for the eighteenth-century town, and utterly unable to handle the problems of the nineteenth-century city.²

Reformers read Malthus in this context and set out to remake the world of charity in the early nineteenth century. Private reformers—moral entrepreneurs—adopted one part of the Malthusian program: moral reform. They created voluntary societies to instill in the poor the self-discipline that would make poor relief unnecessary. Municipal authorities followed another, complementary path and created new public institutions to deter pauperism.

CHAPTER 1
Moral Entrepreneurs and the Invention of the Reformable Child

The moral entrepreneurs were urban missionaries seeking to awaken the souls of the unchurched poor. They did not intend to organize welfare or to undertake the cultural transformation of the poor. But they confronted increasing destitution and the poor besieged them with requests for aid. Eventually forced into relief-giving, the missionaries organized a social welfare bureaucracy in order to prevent impostors from taking advantage of them. However, the missionaries’ efforts largely failed. Unable to distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy poor, or even to settle differences among themselves, they turned instead to the children of the poor. They hoped to prevent pauperism by teaching children self-restraint and self-reliance.¹

The missionaries were entrepreneurs in two senses: they defined a set of social problems and they created the enterprise of reform. The moral entrepreneurs discovered the extent of poverty, delinquency, and class differences in the early nineteenth century, they publicized the existence of social problems, and they established organizations to combat them.²

The Moral Instruction Society

The Society for Moral and Religious Instruction of the Poor (1816) was Boston’s first urban missionary society, and it embodied the hope that moral reform might eradicate poverty.³ Other groups had organized to relieve the economic distress brought by the Embargo and the War of 1812, but the Moral Instruction Society was the first to propose converting the poor rather than offering relief to a specific group such as widows or seamen. Established by business and professional men, including Pliny Cutler, a merchant and manufacturer and one of the wealthiest men in Boston, Henry Thurston, a well-to-do lawyer, Charles Cleveland, a broker, and Samuel Armstrong, a publisher, the Society investigated prostitution and urban vice and pressed religious tracts on the poor.⁴

The Society did not enjoy much success. They literally preached to the converted—the unchurched poor showed little interest in their work. As early as 1821 the Reverend Samuel Jenks, the Society’s secretary, reflected in his diary that while some advances in ministering to adults had been made, they were “small & the prospect dim.” Jenks believed he had failed to convert anyone and he wondered if “the Lord has rejected my labours.” The missionaries’ inability to attract an audience to their services led them to begin the “painful” duty of home visiting. The Society’s female visitors, who repeatedly knocked at the doors of the most “ignorant and heedless” families, concluded, “we find some whom in charity, we think pious.” If this condescension is typical of missionaries’ attitudes, it is not surprising that few among the poor converted even while they besieged the Society with requests for assistance.⁵

Eventually, the Moral Instruction Society succumbed to conflict with the poor, who exchanged promises of conversion in order to get aid. Handwritten comments at the end of the 1830 report quote one of the Society’s missionaries: “‘Am more and more convinced that there are very few virtuous and suffering poor.’” Such suspicions led the Society to complain that home visiting involved missionaries “with a multitude of cases merely secular” that they were not well equipped to handle. Some found themselves deceived by professional beggars with whom “the city is infested.” The Society argued that its missionaries were not “ex-officio overseers of the poor.” Reluctant to visit the homes of the poor, unwilling to provide relief, especially during a depression, and fearful of being taken in by impostors, the Society suspended its work in January 1838. Converting the poor—and reshaping their culture—proved more difficult than anyone had imagined.⁶

Joseph Tuckerman and the Ministry to the Poor

Not every missionary effort fared as poorly as did that of the Moral Instruction Society. Joseph Tuckerman, Charles Francis Barnard, and the other members of the Ministry to the Poor found a warmer reception when they visited the homes of the poor, no doubt due to their obvious sympathy. Tuckerman wrote, “I am received with great kindness and affection in the families in which I visit.” However, even the ministers to the poor eventually doubted their ability to transform the poor morally. By the 1830s, Tuckerman and his ministers exhibited frustrations with the poor similar to those experienced by the Moral Instruction Society.⁷

Joseph Tuckerman presents antebellum moral reform’s most humane face. He deserves reinterpretation, for he was not simply a forerunner of modern social service work, an apologist for entrepreneurial capitalism, or an advocate of harsh measures to control the poor. Tuckerman wrestled with the moral problems presented by a free market economy and he developed a range of responses to poverty and delinquency, including the first social welfare bureaucracy. Tuckerman’s career represents both the possibilities and the limits of antebellum moral reform.⁸

Tuckerman was the best-known urban missionary in antebellum Boston. The son and grandson of wealthy merchants, he received a B.A. in 1798 and an M.A. in 1801 from Harvard. He spent the next twenty-five years in relative obscurity, as pastor to a small congregation in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Suffering constantly from poor health, Tuckerman began to look for an alternative to the strain of maintaining his congregation. In 1826, he heeded the call of his friend and mentor, William Ellery Channing, and “retired” to the post of minister to the poor in Boston. At the age of forty-eight, Tuckerman entered the career that brought him renown.⁹

Tuckerman always admonished his audience to treat the poor with respect, arguing that all men were children of God. He maintained that “the poorest, the lowest, the most degraded is the brother, and the fellow immortal of the richest, the most intellectual, the most cultivated, the most virtuous.” In fact, society had as much to fear from the “licentiousness of wealth” as from the growth of pauperism. While he devoted far more attention to the latter, Tuckerman never lost his belief in the spiritual equality of man.¹⁰

Unlike his contemporaries, Tuckerman rarely blamed the poor for their poverty. In the late 1820s temperance became increasingly central to the bourgeois definition of character, and reformers perceived intemperance as the most important contributor to poverty. Yet Tuckerman argued that intemperance was a symptom, not a cause, of destitution. To be sure, he had little sympathy for idlers who wasted money on drink, and he believed that it was absurd to speak of the constitutional rights of those who refused to support themselves. Nonetheless, he maintained that persistent unemployment could lead to drink or even to crime. He blamed “society” or its “more favored classes” for the poor’s intemperance more than the poor themselves. The poor had to learn to save their wages for hard times, but the “wise” had to teach them self-restraint.¹¹

Tuckerman was equally sympathetic to others among the poor who were normally considered morally defective. He argued that young prostitutes were like children, “wayward and passionate, impatient of restraint; and vain, giddy and light-minded,” who had grown up in conditions “too perilous for human virtue.” Tuckerman did not absolve prostitutes of moral responsibility, but like the women evangelicals who organized rescue missions, he argued for a more sophisticated understanding of the class and gender relations that led to prostitution.¹² Tuckerman described professional beggars as “more sinned against than sinning.” Given that they were treated as outcasts, owned nothing but the clothes they wore, and existed without friends or family, he asked, “is it surprising that they are debased and shameless; alternately insolent and servile?” In sum, at the beginning of his career as an urban missionary Tuckerman resisted the emerging bourgeois consensus that tended to equate poverty with vice, and it is likely that his views helped him gain an audience among the poor.¹³

Tuckerman’s career also shows the limits of antebellum moral reform. His belief in the spiritual and moral equality of individuals, whatever their social condition, did not translate into other forms of egalitarianism. And despite an acute economic analysis of the causes of poverty, Tuckerman remained convinced of the inviolability of the laws of the free market.

Tuckerman accepted a hierarchical social order; nothing in his background prepared him for anything different. He used the social relationships in his former Chelsea parish to illustrate his goals for his ministry. Tuckerman believed that rich and poor had met before the church door, exchanged greetings, and then proceeded to the proprietary pews or the free seats “without the slightest feeling … that distinction of condition was thus implied between them.” Restoring personal relationships between rich and poor did not mean erasing social distinctions. Tuckerman assured his readers that he wished to raise the degraded spiritually, and “not above their accustomed employments … nor above contentment with a very humble external condition.” Tuckerman, whatever his sympathies for the poor, did not object to inequities of wealth and power and to the ordering of life by the marketplace.¹⁴

Tuckerman remained bound by the constraints of political economy in his analysis of poverty. He observed the economic disruption caused by mercantile capitalism, including the utter dependence of the unskilled wage worker upon his employer, the use of technology to displace labor, the inability of journeymen to become masters, and the poor’s reliance on child labor for support. While artisan republicans used these facts to criticize capitalism, Tuckerman could not conceive of an alternative to the marketplace. He perceived structural problems in the economy, but there his analysis failed him. While he urged employers to keep up their wages as long as possible during economic downturns, he also noted that violation of the laws of political economy only hurt the poor. Subsidized housing, employment programs, and soup kitchens attracted “idlers and vagrants” from the country and created more problems than they solved. After discussing the economic causes of poverty, Tuckerman fell back on the Malthusian argument that the only real way to change the condition of the poor was “by improving their characters.” Tuckerman’s failings were those of nineteenth-century classical liberalism.¹⁵

Changing the character of the poor meant having home visitors instruct them in bourgeois values. The poor, Tuckerman commented, indulged their appetites and sometimes were “intemperate, filthy, wasteful and improvident.” They suffered from low wages, “but not half as much as from a misapplication of the wages they receive.” Only home visitors could teach the poor to live without relief by training them to practice “forecast and economy” and to “exercise a present denial in view of a future good.” Character reform, as much as the hope for religious conversion, underlay the work of Tuckerman’s Ministry to the Poor.¹⁶

By the 1830s, Tuckerman had organized a small army of home visitors through the Ministry to the Poor. Tuckerman’s first recruit, Charles Francis Barnard, was the most notable, for he took the ministry in new directions in his work with children. Barnard was born to a wealthy merchant family in 1808, and attended Harvard College and Harvard Divinity School before joining Tuckerman in 1832. The following year, Frederick Gray, born in 1804 and raised by his wealthy grandmother, gave up his partnership in a publishing house to join Tuckerman’s ministry. Robert Waterston, born in 1812 to a merchant father, apprenticed himself at age fifteen to a Boston merchant, before leaving commerce for the Harvard Divinity School at the instigation of William Ellery Channing. He joined the Ministry to the Poor in 1839, a few months before his marriage to the daughter of former mayor Josiah Quincy. The Ministry to the Poor consisted of well-connected, energetic men in their mid to late twenties, who left the business world to devote themselves to careers in moral enterprise.¹⁷

The Ministry to the Poor was a religious bureaucracy that brought moral reform to hundreds of poor families. In reviewing the accomplishments of his lieutenants in 1838, Tuckerman found that Charles Francis Barnard visited 248 families, totaling 445 adults and 708 children. Over seven hundred children and adults attended Barnard’s weekly services, while 542 children had enrolled in his Sunday school, with its forty-eight female and twelve male teachers and five assistants. Frederick Gray visited 230 families, enrolled 362 pupils in his Sunday school, and had thirty-eight teachers instructing the two hundred students in his sewing school. John Sargent, who had joined Tuckerman’s ministry in 1837, visited three hundred families and counted 130 children in his Sunday school. Although it is difficult to estimate the number of children and families affected by the Sunday schools and urban missions, it is clear that after the public schools, they served as the most important institutional mechanisms for transmitting cultural values.¹⁸

In their meetings with the poor, Tuckerman and his ministers encountered the same demands for relief as had the visitors of the Moral Instruction Society. Out of their conflict with the poor emerged new efforts to organize welfare. After six years as a minister to the poor, Tuckerman became a leading exponent of Malthusian welfare reform, and public and private welfare in Boston reflected his influence.

Pauperism and the Organization of Charity

Tuckerman’s experiences convinced him that Boston’s charities had been too generous and had actually encouraged people to rely on welfare. As early as 1829 Tuckerman began calling for cooperation among charitable organizations in order to weed out undeserving applicants for aid. The deserving poor—those who could not support themselves because of illness, accident, temporary misfortune, or age —had a moral right to relief and could be aided most effectively by private sources who were aware of their problems. Others did not deserve to starve but, in keeping with the latest in Anglo-American reform thought, should find relief only in the municipal workhouse.

Tuckerman did what he could to make the workhouse the centerpiece of public welfare in Massachusetts. As the leading expert on poverty, he was appointed to the ...