1831
Page 9
It is not surprising that orthodox reviewers condemned Ware’s book as “defective” in its religious understanding. “The sinner is directed to be a philosopher,” wrote a bemused Calvinist in Spirit of the Pilgrims, “and by retiring into himself and forming good resolutions” to achieve salvation. But what some found faulty, others found sound. Ware preached a gospel of self-help that offered a solution to the problems that afflicted Americans: anxiety, ambition, competition, dislocation. Through solitude one achieved “quiet self-possession” and then was suited to enter the public world of business to partake in “secular affairs.” The home, nurtured by women, became sacralized as a haven against the disordering effects of “the distractions of common life.” An emphasis on self-help and individual responsibility also offered a ready explanation for why some succeeded and others failed. The urban laboring classes in particular suffered from long hours, low wages, mounting debts, and increasing poverty and unemployment. The solution to their problems, some argued, rested not with unions, or public relief, or reconfiguring relations between capital and labor, but with the workers themselves. Anyone could rise if he applied himself by gaining an education. At the inaugural Franklin Lectures in Boston, aimed “to promote useful knowledge … among that class from which [Franklin] himself sprung,” the speaker told the assembled laborers and mechanics that “we are all equal” in the ability “to compare, contrive, invent, improve, and perfect.” “It depends mainly on each individual” whether or not he or she advances.19
The laboring classes had their own perspective on the religious and moral enthusiasm that surrounded them. The Working Man’s Advocate denounced the revivals as “a gigantic effort” on the part of “a certain class of theologians … to get power into their hands, to be used for the destruction of our republican institutions.” Citing Jefferson, the paper reminded its readers that, “of all the forms which ambition assumes, the ecclesiastical is the most dangerous.” Particularly upsetting was the movement on the part of evangelicals to prohibit Sunday public activities, such as mail delivery and stagecoach rides, and to introduce religious education into the public schools. If the evangelicals seemed suspicious, the myriad new religious societies germinating from the spiritual preoccupations of the day seemed insane. Most curious of all were the Mormons, led by Joseph Smith, who claimed that he could perform miracles and that angels revealed to him a lost portion of the Bible. Focusing on cooperative enterprise, theocratic rule, and male authority, the Mormon Church won converts by the thousands. Opponents denounced them as “a strange and ridiculous sect” led by “knaves pretending to have found some holy writings” and peopled by “blind and deluded” followers from “the lazy and worthless classes of society.” One editor condemned the religion as “mental cholera morbus.” In 1831, the Mormons, persecuted in western New York, settled in Kirtland, Ohio, the first stop on a trail west that would eventually lead them to Salt Lake City, Utah. Religious enthusiasms from evangelicalism to Mormonism, concluded the editor of the Working Man’s Advocate, had created not only a class of “fanatics, but lunatics and maniacs” all bent on “enslaving the minds, preparatory to enslaving the bodies, of the rising generation.”20
WOMEN AND WORKING CLASSES
Questions of religion, gender, and class became linked when the Magdalen Society in New York issued its first report in June. This society, established in 1830, sought to provide an “asylum for females who have deviated from the paths of virtue, and are desirous of being restored to a respectable station in society by religious instruction and the formation of moral and industrious habits.” As its name suggested, the Magdalen Society focused on prostitution and set out to build a “place of refuge” where fallen women could be reformed through religious conversion and education. Arthur Tappan, a wealthy New York merchant who, along with his brother Lewis, supported various reform efforts including the abolition of slavery, presided over the society. The report claimed, “The number of females in this city, who abandon themselves to prostitution is not less than TEN THOUSAND!!” That figure comprised only “public” prostitutes; the figure doubled if one considered the “private harlots and kept misses, many of whom keep up a show of industry as domestics, seamstresses, and nurses in the most respectable families.” These prostitutes, the report insisted, generate six million dollars a year, “a waste of wealth … when weighed beside the loss of hundreds of thousands of immortal souls.” The author of the report claimed to have a list of names of “the men and boys who are the seducers of the innocent, or the companions of the polluted.” Proclaiming that many of these prostitutes came from the working-class neighborhoods of the city and were “harlots by choice,” the report made clear the society’s objective of succeeding “not merely by rescuing and reforming them, not merely by affording a refuge from misery, but by providing a school of virtue; not simply to destroy the habits of idleness and vice, but to substitute those of honorable and profitable industry, thus benefiting society, while the individual is reclaimed.”
It was the clearest statement of the objectives of evangelical middle-class reform yet written. Substitute for the prostitute the criminal, the drunkard, the pauper, even the slave, and the same formula applied. Not everyone in New York, however, shared the worldview of Tappan and his associates. The public received the report with “unbounded indignation,” denounced it as “grossly revolting and disgraceful,” and declared it a calumny upon the working classes of the city. In addition to newspapers, tracts, and handbills condemning the report, two anti-Magdalen meetings were held at Tammany Hall, and salacious drawings that portrayed Tappan’s “real” interest in prostitution circulated widely. Opponents directed part of their attack against the facts presented in the report, facts that “are nearly impossible to be true.” If the Magdalen Society numbers were accurate, then, based on a population of just over two hundred thousand, “one out of three of the marriageable females of New York at this moment received the wages of prostitution. One out of every six, is an abandoned, promiscuous prostitute … [and] more than half of the adult males, married and unmarried, visit prostitutes more than three times a week!” If, as the report claimed, thirteen million dollars were spent annually on prostitutes, then each male, assuming a fourth of the men between the ages of fifteen and sixty contributed, paid $1,177.68 per year for sexual gratification. Using the word as an adjective rather than a noun, one writer concluded that it was the statistics that were prostitute.21
The Magdalen Society needed such outrageous numbers, opponents claimed, to bolster their evangelical aims: “Motive is always to be suspected when religion seems to be the real or ostensible one.” The society acted as an auxiliary to “the church and state party” that sought to fuse religion with politics. Those who blew orthodox bubbles did not realize that “fear of punishment in another world has never yet restrained people from the practice of vice in this,” and that the failure of religion to prevent immorality “is the very proof of its inefficiency.” Indeed, corruption progressed most easily under the cloak of religion. In Confessions of a Magdalen, one woman told of being seduced and forced into prostitution by her pastor. “The presence of darkness,” she warned, “sometimes appears as the angel of light.” If these ministers and seminary students who located prostitutes “were as pure and honest as they ought to have been, they could not know anything of this vice.” Wondering about the private asylum planned by the Magdalen Society and echoing fears of conspiracy that ran deep in the American character, one writer inquired, “How is the public to know what is done within these secret walls? What is to prevent it from becoming an engine of religious torture to some?”
Readers found the profiles of the prostitutes as infuriating as the statistical impossibilities and religious homilies of the Magdalen Report. Though conceding that prostitutes came from all backgrounds, the report focused on the working classes as the source of the evil: “Hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, are the daughters of the ignorant, depraved, and vicious part of our po
pulation, trained up without culture of any kind, amidst the contagion of evil example, and enter upon a life of prostitution for the gratification of their unbridled passions.” In October, months after the initial controversy, the board of directors of the Magdalen Society issued a second report, in which they acknowledged “inaccuracies” and “ambiguities” in the statistics but reaffirmed the view that the “lower classes crowded together in our cities who come under no favorable moral influence” turn to prostitution.22
If some working-class women turned to prostitution, it was because of economic hardship, not cultural inferiority, responded opponents. Men like Tappan, who shielded themselves behind religious intentions, actually did more to promote prostitution than abate it. After all, as a leading retailer in the city, he forgot “that his own traffic is the cause, indirectly, of making more prostitutes than all the distilleries in the country.” Instead of “prayers, bibles, and tracts,” why not “afford them the means of an honest living by an honest employment.” At the time the report appeared, the tailoresses of New York went on strike to raise their wages and receive a fair price. The Working Man’s Advocate struggled to awaken interest in the cause of the “oppressed and almost enslaved Tailoresses,” whose condition, “as regards the necessities and comforts of life, is undoubtedly worse than that of the Southern slaves.” Several writers made the connection between the Magdalen Society and the plight of the women workers: “Those who work as tailoresses, are at present standing out for higher wages, in order to prevent being crushed to the earth, sunk to utter degradation. Let this society assist them in their laudable endeavors to get an honest living.” Though the critique of the Magdalen Society as an engine of religious oppression and an elitist assault upon the working classes and urban poor of New York did not win citywide support for the working women, it did have its effect: on December 7, the board of directors of the Magdalen Society voted to cease operations.23
Organized as never before, the working classes sought to advance their interests. Newly formed workingmen’s societies served as self-improvement and self-empowerment associations. In an address at Dedham, Massachusetts, Samuel Whitcomb explained to the audience why farmers, mechanics, and laborers were more useful and important to society than lawyers, merchants, and capitalists. Arguing that the trading and commercial portion of the population constituted one million out of ten, he asked whether this fraction merited its disproportionate control over at least half the property in the nation. “Suppose some providential dispensation should at once remove the whole of this class of persons from our country—would the remaining nine million starve and perish? Would our Republic be brought to an end—our Union be dissolved—our civil institutions be abandoned—our churches and school-houses be shut up, think ye, for the loss of a million of merchants, lawyers, and capitalists?” Whitcomb then reversed the inquiry: “Suppose all our farmers, and mechanics, and manufacturers, and artisans and labourers, were to be suddenly removed from the country—what would become of the rest? What would … this delicate and enterprising million of people do for food to eat, raiment to put on, dwellings to shelter, fire to warm, and comforts of every sort to cheer them on their journey to heaven?”24
Buoyed by a growing awareness of their power in society, mechanics and laborers formed political parties. In Philadelphia, the party grew out of the Mechanics Union of Trade Associations in 1828. In New York, the Working Men’s Party showed considerable strength in the city elections of 1829. The New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics & Other Working Men was formed at a meeting in Providence in December. For the first time, newspapers devoted to worker’s interest appeared: the Mechanics’ Free Press, the Working Man’s Advocate, the New England Artisan and Farmers, Mechanics, and Laboring Man’s Repository. Every issue of the Working Man’s Advocate—edited by George Henry Evans, a recent British emigrant—carried a list of Working Men’s measures:
EQUAL UNIVERSAL EDUCATION
ABOLITION OF ALL LICENSED MONOPOLIES
ABOLITION OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
ABOLITION OF IMPRISONMENT FOR DEBT
AN ENTIRE REVISION OR ABOLITION OF THE PRESENT MILITIA SYSTEM
A LESS EXPENSIVE LAW SYSTEM
EQUAL TAXATION ON PROPERTY
AN EFFECTIVE LIEN LAW FOR LABORERS ON BUILDINGS
A DISTRICT SYSTEM OF ELECTIONS
NO LEGISLATION ON RELIGION
It seems like a motley list, but all lists have their logic, and this one was guided by workers’ fears of the encroachment of power upon liberty. In its control of laws and elections and institutions, the state held excessive power. And with the power to coerce came the power to imprison, enslave, and execute. Religion, with its strictures and secrecies, posed the greatest threat against liberty. Only education—free, public, universal—offered hope that through knowledge and self-improvement workers could resist the forces of capital that pressed down upon them. In his Working Man’s Manual, Stephen Simpson, a leader of Philadelphia’s labor movement and the editor of the Mechanics’ Free Press, declared that the workers had not yet commenced their own American revolution. “Let the producers of labor but once fully comprehend their injuries and fully appreciate their strength at the polls,” he declared, “and the present oppressive system will vanish like the mists of morning, before the rising sun.”25
Of the various issues identified by the Working Men’s movement, the abolition of imprisonment for debt received the most action, in part because politicians and reformers other than workers found problems and injustices with the practice. “It seems to be now almost universally admitted that the present system imperiously demands a reform,” reported one commentator in the North American Review. The board of managers of the Prison Discipline Society reported the numbers of those imprisoned for debt annually in various states: three thousand in Massachusetts, ten thousand in New York, seven thousand in Pennsylvania, three thousand in Maryland. The majority of these debtors, they found, were imprisoned for trifling sums, often less than five dollars. Of conditions in all the states surveyed, they found “nothing worse, in the whole length and breadth of the land, than in New Jersey,” where a high proportion of debtors languished in filthy facilities and the state spent more than the original debt to recover the debt, while providing no support at all for those in prison—just “walls, bars, and bolts.”
The arguments against imprisonment for debt came from all directions. Some focused on the injustice and inexpedience of the punishment, pointing to the wretched prison conditions and arguing that incarceration would not increase the creditor’s chances of recovering the debt. Others focused on the paltry sums for which debtors could be confined. In the examinations of the causes of debt, a distinction emerged between fraud and honest debt, the one deserving the harshest penalties and the other deserving sympathy and understanding. “The inability to pay one’s debts is itself no proof of crime,” declared Edward Everett, senator from Massachusetts. “It may, and often does, arise from the act of God, and misfortune in all its forms. A man may become insolvent in consequence of sickness, shipwreck, a fire, a bad season, political changes.” Bad luck, not bad intentions. Stephen Simpson shifted the focus from the honest worker to the despotic capitalist. Since a complaint from the creditor led to the imprisonment of the debtor, the law thereby “invests the creditor with the power over the PERSON, the BODY, and consequently the LIFE of the debtor, who in vain pleads the will to pay, but appeals to God to show that he has no ability to second his will … . Capital and law have usurped a power, contrary to the natural laws of labour, as well as repugnant to the principles of the American Declaration of Independence.”26
A number of states had already instituted changes in the laws governing debtor’s prison (eliminating the jailing of female debtors, raising the minimum amount of debt, compelling creditors to pay an allowance for bread money), but New York went a step further and, on April 26, passed a law abolishing imprisonment for debt. Responding to the governor’s address to the
Assembly, in which he proclaimed imprisonment for debt “repugnant to humanity,” legislators prepared a report that recommended abolition. Intentions, they argued, mattered. Not paying a debt afforded “no evidence of moral turpitude or criminal intent, and without such evidence, we have no authority to invade the right of personal liberty.” Imprisonment was an appropriate punishment for fraud, but not for debt. Further, under current laws, the presumption of innocence and the right to a speedy trial before an impartial jury were abandoned in favor of the “presumption of fraud arising in the mind of one individual,” the creditor. The debtor “is put to the torture and starved into a compliance with the wishes or designs of his creditor.” The effect of the punishment in this case was retribution against an individual, not reformation of a criminal, because “indebtedness is not a crime, … misfortune is not an offence.” Jail serves only to “swell the amount of [the debtor’s] afflictions, and press him more heavily to the earth than before.”