By the 1840s, leaders of both public and private charitable endeavors linked relief to the moral character of those in need and generally measured that character by the standards of affluent Protestants. Upper-class Americans had long debated whether the poor would learn habits of industry and thrift if they were simply given aid without working for it. Concern over the “idle poor”—those who were physically able to work but did not—intensified as more and more immigrants joined the ranks of the needy. The debate was deeply gendered. Women and children were considered the worthiest recipients of aid, and middle- and upper-class women the appropriate dispensers of charity. Successful men, meanwhile, often linked poverty to weakness and considered giving pennies to a beggar an unmanly act that indulged the worst traits of the poor. They focused on building workhouses or expanding almshouses, though preferably at little expense to city residents.
The panic of 1837 convinced some benevolent leaders that public workhouses and almshouses offered the best hope for helping the poor. Alternatively, charitable societies sought to improve the environment in an effort to change the conditions that produced poverty. In the 1840s and 1850s, they built orphan asylums, schools, hospitals, and homes for working women to provide vulnerable residents with housing, education, domestic skills, and advice.
The “undeserving” poor faced grimmer choices. They received public assistance only through the workhouse or the local jail. Rowdy men who gambled away what little they earned, prostitutes who tempted respectable men into vice, and immigrants who preferred idle poverty to virtuous labor figured in newspaper articles, investigative reports, and novels. In fictional portrayals, naive girls were often the victims of immoral men or unfortunate circumstance. One of the first mass-produced books in the United States, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) was set in Puritan New England but addressed contemporary concerns about the seduction of innocents. It illustrated the social ostracism and poverty suffered by a woman who bore a child out of wedlock.
Other fictional tales placed the blame for fallen women on foreigners, especially Catholics. Such works drew vivid portraits of young nuns ravished by priests and then thrown out pregnant and penniless. These stories attracted tens of thousands of readers in the United States and heightened anti-Catholic sentiment, which periodically boiled over into attacks on Catholic homes, schools, churches, and convents.
Economic competition further intensified conflicts between immigrants and native-born Americans. By the 1840s, Americans who opposed immigration took the name nativists and launched public campaigns against foreigners, especially Irish Catholics. In May 1844, nativists clashed with Irishmen in Philadelphia after shots were fired from a firehouse. A dozen nativists and one Irishmen were killed the first day. The next night, nativists looted and burned Irish businesses and Catholic churches.
See Document 11.3 for an example of nativist sentiment from a well-known inventor.
Most native-born workers distanced themselves from immigrants, but others believed that class solidarity was crucial to overcoming the power wielded by employers. Nevertheless, only highly skilled immigrants were likely to gain entrance to labor organizations. Although immigrants with sufficient resources to open businesses or establish themselves in professions might gain middle-class status, only pious immigrants from Protestant backgrounds were likely to be truly accepted into middle-class society.
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How and why did American manufacturing change over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century? |
How did Northerners respond to the hard times that followed the panic of 1837? How did responses to the crisis vary by class, ethnicity, and religion? |