USA > New York > A short history of New York State > Part 33
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In this reform movement New York, particularly the upstate region, led the nation. No other section produced more leaders of the caliber of Theodore Weld, Charles Finney, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Gerrit Smith, and the Tappan brothers in New York City. Probably the most irrepressi- ble reformer was Gerrit Smith, whose career, like a seismograph, regis- tered every tremor of the reform movement. Smith became interested as a young man in the benevolent societies, notably the Sunday School Union and the American Bible Society. Soon he branched out into tem- perance and abolition, the major concern of his adult life. But other re- forms captured his fancy. He experimented with manual-training schools; he served as vice-president of the American Peace Society; he backed the crusade for women's rights; he clamored against tobacco, secret societies, and British rule in Ireland.
Alcohol was the rival of slavery as a target of the reformers. Intem- perance was a public scandal, taking a heavy toll in unhappy homes, ruined health, and criminal behavior. A few individuals had denounced the liquor traffic and founded temperance societies before 1825, but these efforts had only temporary or local success. The temperance movement made headway only when evangelical religion placed behind the cam- paign its resources of consecrated leaders, able organizers, and a guilt- conscious fellowship. Stirred by Finney's words and responding to the appeals of Lyman Beecher from Litchfield, Connecticut, reformers be- gan to organize local societies to combat Demon Rum. By 1827 the Gen- eral Assembly of the Presbyterian church and the New York Synod of
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the Reformed Dutch church were urging the co-operation of their clergy. The next year the Methodists fell in line, reviving John Wesley's stern opposition to the manufacture and sale of ardent spirits by any member of that church.
The New York State Temperance Society, founded in 1829, directed a network of local societies which claimed over 100,000 members by the end of 1850. The state society sent millions of pamphlets and scores of lecturers to paint the horrors of drunkenness and its high cost to society. Members of the local societies pledged themselves to abstain from the use of ardent spirits in the home, at work, and at social functions. Pres- sure was brought upon tavern keepers and grocers to curtail or end the sale of liquor.
The leaders kept driving the temperance movement further toward total abstinence and toward state-wide prohibition. One of their first goals was tightening the license system. Village trustees had interpreted loosely the state excise law of 1801 which limited tavern licenses to those establishments considered "absolutely necessary for the benefit of travel- ers." In fact, many places were selling liquor without benefit of a license. In Brooklyn and other villages temperance advocates demanded strict enforcement of the law. For example, George Hall in 1833 got control of the Brooklyn Board of Trustees and drastically cut down the number of licenses granted to taverns. His enforcement of the law wiped out a host of grogshops, to the dismay of Irish workingmen.
The substitution of abstinence for temperance as the goal was vir- tually a brand new reform which some temperance advocates could not approve. The conservatives, however, could not prevent the state society in 1836 from pushing through a resolution requiring "total abstinence from all that can intoxicate." Other moderates disliked the attack on the use of wine at the communion table.
The temperance movement picked up speed in the 1840's with the formation of the Washington Temperance Society, made up of "reformed inebriates." Led by John B. Gough, a brilliant but controversial figure, the Washingtonians enthralled thousands with their confessions of shame and degradation. Other temperance enthusiasts joined the Sons of Temperance fully equipped with regalia and boasting an elaborate ritual.
Despite all this agitation, drunkenness continued to be a problem, especially after the hard-drinking Irish and beer-drinking Germans poured into the urban centers and augmented the ranks of native tipplers. The temperance forces in 1845 pushed through the legislature a local option bill, and within a year over 80 per cent of the towns voted for no licenses within their borders. Tavern keepers, brewers, distillers, and "wets" took alarm and secured the repeal of this law in 1847.
The temperance and abstinence movement in the early 1850's was
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swinging over to a campaign for prohibition. The "drys" enlisted a majority of the farmers, the evangelical Protestants, and the native born. Horace Greeley thundered against the six thousand licensed and one thousand unlicensed grogshops in New York City. The Whig politicians embraced the prohibition cause and put through an act in 1854 which the Demo- cratic Governor Horatio Seymour roundly vetoed. The next year a pro- hibition statute received the approval of Governor Myron Clark but was declared invalid by the Court of Appeals. The prohibition act of 1855 met open defiance in the cities, where officials, aware of the political power of saloon keepers and the foreign born, refused to aid in its enforcement or that of other regulatory laws. An investigation in 1858 showed that over 3,400 saloons were open on Sunday in violation of the law.
Temperance agitation did score some victories. Drinking to excess was definitely frowned upon in many circles, and some communities succeeded either in restricting or banning the sale of spirits.
Some temperance apostles also attacked the use of tea, coffee, and tobacco and questioned the eating of meat and spices. Although these campaigns won few supporters, they illustrate the lengths to which some of the reformers went. Sylvester Graham wrote to Gerrit Smith that a diet of whole wheat would "sanctify the race" and "make the whole human family better and happier, by the removal as far as possible, of every evil -physical, physiological, mental, and moral."
Abolition, the greatest reform movement of the period, enlisted a large number of its leaders and supporters in New York. An earlier generation had taken steps toward gradual emancipation of the children born to slaves in New York State and had passed a law in 1827 providing for the speeding up of that process. Meanwhile the religious groups backing the various benevolent societies-Sunday School, temperance, Bible, and so on-began to express concern over the plight of the slave. The success of the British reformers in securing emancipation in the colonies by 1834 in- spired American humanitarians to emulate their example.
Arthur and Lewis Tappan, wealthy merchants of Manhattan, had been prominent figures in the benevolent societies of the 1820's. They invited Charles Finney to come to New York City to revive the churches and to join in their humanitarian activities. In 1831 the Tappan brothers laid plans for a national antislavery society to sponsor local chapters, send out agents, circulate periodicals, and stir up the conscience of the Protestant churches. At first the Tappans stirred up more hostility than support. But in 1833 they won the aid of James Birney, brilliant Kentucky land- owner, and Theodore Weld, one of Finney's outstanding converts, and the American Anti-Slavery Society was formed. Weld, after his conver- sion in Utica, had promoted a manual-labor school at Whitestown and preached temperance sermons. In 1833 Weld accepted the task of organiz-
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ing a group of seventy men who would give abolition lectures and help form local societies.
Abolition propaganda made gains despite the opposition of conserva- tives and laborers. By 1834 there were at least two hundred local societies and several abolition journals in New York. A decisive factor was the Utica Convention of 1835, called in that city despite the opposition of the Common Council. Hardly had the six hundred delegates assembled when a mob rushed into the meeting. The delegates were forced to adjourn to Peterboro, where Gerrit Smith gave them haven. Smith, who had already shown interest in many reform movements, threw his full weight behind their movement because of the attack upon basic civil rights.
The next year Smith was appointed by the American Anti-Slavery So- ciety as one of its seventy agents. Through the efforts of these agents, abolition sentiment, which had taken root first in the Presbyterian church, spread into the Methodist and Baptist denominations.
By 1838 many abolitionist leaders were entering politics, since they real- ized that resolutions and appeals to morality would not eliminate slavery in the United States. At first they sent petitions to Congress urging the end of slavery in the District of Columbia and in the territories. Their sec- ond step was to organize the Liberty party, which made a poor showing in 1840 and 1844 and later merged with the Republican party. The aboli- tionists suffered from many internal quarrels which led to numerous splits and divisions in the movement.
Only a tiny fraction of New Yorkers became abolitionists, but a large number gradually swung to the stand of opposing the extension of slavery into the territories of the United States. Antislavery sentiments increased and influenced many members of the major parties. The political effects of the movement are dealt with in Chapter 19.
Several dramatic episodes connected with the Underground Railway stirred up great excitement. The Jerry Rescue of 1851, in which leading citizens took a fugitive slave away from the United States marshal in Syracuse, illustrate the desperate lengths to which abolitionists went to thwart the processes of the law. They denounced the Fugitive Slave Law as immoral and invalid on the ground that it denied the Declaration of Independence. Many conservative citizens disliked the fanaticism of the abolitionists and feared that their tactics would subvert law and order. In general, the Irish immigrants and unskilled labor also opposed emanci- pation because free Negroes might compete with them for jobs.
The abolition crusade left many scars in New York State. Both the Re- publican and Democratic parties were split, and the Presbyterian and Methodist denominations underwent schisms on this issue. Abolitionists did little to help the free Negroes in New York, who were kept in menial positions and denied equal educational and legal rights. Negroes were
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often segregated in schools and transport; they were barred from profes- sions; they were discriminated against in business.
Other evils besides intemperance and slavery pricked the consciences of the reformers. John R. McDowall, a Presbyterian clergyman in New York City, helped to organize the New York Magdalen Society to rescue females who had "deviated from the paths of virtue." Other reformers organized the American Society for Promoting the Observance of the Seventh Commandment, with local branches in many cities. By 1837 this organization, which changed its name to the New York Female Moral Reform Association, claimed 250 auxiliaries, most of them within New York State.
Women in New York as well as the other states were treated as second- class citizens. They could not vote, enter most professions, secure higher education, or claim adequate legal control over their property or their children. The legislature in 1848 gave married women the same rights of inheritance as those enjoyed by single women.
Meanwhile, a handful of feminists began to demand equal rights for women in all spheres of activity. Most of the early feminists had been active in the temperance and abolition movements, which were split wide open on the question of participation of women. At a dramatic con- vention held in Seneca Falls in 1848, a call was sounded for a Declara- tion of Independence for Women Equality. But opposition greeted the feminists on every side. Conservatives and religious leaders deplored the revolutionary demands as a threat to family life and political stability. Some champions of abolition and temperance stubbornly resisted the ad- mission of women as equal partners. Perhaps most discouraging of all was the indifference or outright hostility of most women in the state.
During the 1850's, however, the feminists scored several triumphs, in addition to developing some of their great leaders of the future. Susan B. Anthony emerged as a national leader, equally effective in organizing local societies as in lobbying at state capitals. In 1860 the New York legislature passed the "Earnings Bill," which secured to a married woman the prop- erty she had acquired by inheritance or by her labors. Wives were de- clared to be joint guardians of children, and they were also legally entitled to receive a life estate in one-third of real estate upon the death of their husbands intestate.
Feminists also tried to reform women's clothing. Elizabeth Smith Miller, who inherited the spirit of reform from her father Gerrit Smith, designed a new costume consisting of a knee-length skirt and loose trousers gathered at the ankle. Mrs. Amelia Bloomer of Seneca Falls had the courage to in- troduce this garb in public and to urge its adoption in her little periodical The Lily. Whenever the Bloomer girls appeared in public, men stared and some jeered. Children ran after them chanting derisively:
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Hi Ho In sleet and snow Mrs. Bloomer's all the go. Twenty tailors to take the stitches Plenty of women to wear the britches.
As a result of this reception the women reformers gave up the fight and returned to trailing skirts. A hundred years later a Broadway musical comedy, later televised to the nation, added to the fame of Amelia Bloomer and her Bloomer girls.
The crusade for world peace, like the drive for abolition, owed its first impetus to the Quakers, but it also required the dynamism of revivalist re- ligion to attract wide public support. David Low Dodge had written peace tracts as early as 1809 and a few years later organized the New York Peace Society. In 1828 this group became a branch of the American Peace Society. Although its leadership came from New England, Gerrit Smith and the Reverend Samuel May of Syracuse were active in the cause.
The appalling conditions of the insane and criminal classes won the sympathy of a few reformers. The mildly insane ordinarily lived at home; the more dangerous were often locked in miserable unheated garrets or sheds; the pauper insane were thrown into jail or into the county poor- house. Ordinarily the directors of poorhouses were political appointees and not qualified to handle the mentally sick. They often chained the in- sane in dungeons and beat them at the slightest provocation. Dorothea Dix in her masterly report of 1844 cited an official who boasted that he fed his charges on less than four cents a week.
Bloomingdale Asylum on Manhattan opened its doors in 1821 to take care of insane paupers sent to it from towns and counties throughout the state. Although it was founded and operated by a private group, it re- ceived annual grants from the state. Since its capacity was only two hun- dred, however, it could not handle more than a fraction of the cases. In 1831 Governor Throop urged the creation of an asylum for acute cases of the pauper insane. After five years of delay the legislature established the State Lunatic Asylum at Utica. This institution, the first charitable institution owned, operated, and controlled by the state, made a pretense of giving humane treatment. Wherever possible, patients were taken out of cells, allowed to work on the land, and provided with amusements. Three years later the state set up another asylum on Blackwell's Island. However, these hospitals could handle only a small number of people. The great majority of the indigent insane remained in the congested poorhouses.
A few counties during the 1840's and 1850's set up separate buildings for their insane, but they could offer little in the form of special treat-
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ment. An exposé in 1865 induced the legislature to establish Willard Hos- pital for the Chronic Insane at Ovid in 1867.
Conditions in the local jail paralleled those of the poorhouse. The city or county jail had large rooms holding a hodge-podge of drunkards, thieves, hardened criminals, debtors, insane, and juvenile offenders. Guards were often brutal; the food was indescribably poor; usually there were no bathing facilities. The underlying principle behind the adminis- tration was retribution. In 1854 Governor Seymour blasted these jails as nurseries of crime.
Auburn Prison attracted world-wide attention for its method of han- dling prisoners. Finding that solitary confinement led to insanity, its author- ities in the 1820's worked out a system of congregate work by day and separation at night. Guards maintained strict silence at all times and ap- plied the whip unsparingly. Other states copied the Auburn plan because the work of the prisoner paid a good share of the operating expenses. Although New York and Pennsylvania led the world in penal reform in the 1830's, the modern observer would consider the discipline severe, if not brutal. No prisoner was allowed to speak with his fellow inmates or communicate with the outside world. His cell was tiny (7 feet by 3 feet 6 inches ), and the food was largely porridge and soups. Flogging was common until state law prohibited it in 1847, and jailors devised cruel punishments, notably the "yoke" and the "shower-bath." In 1853 the warden of Auburn Prison admitted that over two hundred prisoners had undergone the latter penalty, which provided for prolonged immersion. Sing Sing on the Hudson followed the Auburn system. In spite of the severity of this system, conditions in the overcrowded county jails were much worse.
Many reformers, particularly Quakers such as Thomas Eddy and John Griscom, directed their attention to providing special institutions for de- pendent, delinquent, and neglected children. One of their first acts was to put into operation the House of Refuge for the Juvenile Delin- quents in the City of New York, in 1842, the first juvenile reformatory in America. The state granted it financial support and in 1849 set up a similar institution in Rochester for the western counties of the state. Humani- tarians in many localities founded orphanages throughout the state; the number rose from two in 1825 to over sixty by 1866. Both the state and local governments gave financial support to these private institutions. The increase in state support led the legislature in 1867 to establish a central supervisory body which would raise standards and prevent the waste of public funds.
Vagrant children roaming the streets of New York City were a problem to the police department as well as a concern to the reformer. Chief of Police George Matsell reported in 1850, "The degrading and disgusting
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practices of these almost infants in the schools of vice, prostitution, and rowdyism, would certainly be beyond belief." Public-spirited citizens or- ganized the New York Juvenile Asylum in 1853 to receive children be- tween the ages of five and fourteen. The directors placed many of the children out at employment and gave them moral and industrial instruc- tion. The Children's Aid Society founded by Charles Loring Brace in 1853 opposed the trend toward placing children in institutions and attempted to place the children in farm families. His success led reformers in other cities to organize similar societies. The Protestant character of these "placing-out" societies alarmed Roman Catholics, who charged them with taking Catholic children and rearing them in Protestant homes. As a re- sult they organized protectories in New York City and Buffalo.
Pauperism increased in seriousness with urbanization and immigration. Whereas in 1823 there were only 22,111 recipients of public poor relief in a population of approximately 1,500,000, in 1855 there were over 204,000 paupers in the population of approximately 3,400,000. A majority of the paupers lived in cities and a large proportion of them were foreign born.
Reformers, notably the Quakers, were the first to express concern over the plight of the urban poor. In 1819 the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism in New York City made a thorough survey and assigned most of the blame to intemperance. They urged the suppression of grogshops, the establishment of a savings bank, the appointment of members to visit residents in their neighborhoods, and the erection of houses of industry for the unemployed.
Meanwhile the legislators were wrestling with the larger problem of re- forming the old poor law of New York. The agitation in Britain and the urgings of reformers caused the legislators in 1824 to direct Secretary of State John Yates to study the question and to report his recommenda- tions. The Yates Report of 1824, the first comprehensive survey of poor relief in the United States, listed four methods in use in New York: the town poorhouse, home relief, the contract system, and the auction system. Under the contract system all the poor of a town were placed under the care of one or more householders at a fixed rate per month or week. Under the auction system the authorities "sold" the town poor to the lowest bid- der. The latter was seldom accused of overfeeding his charges.
The Yates Report proposed that the county poorhouse become the center of the relief system. Presumably the new system would be more economical since paupers would have to work on the county farm for their keep. Furthermore, the intentional rigors of the workhouse would deter some people from applying for relief. In 1824 the legislature made it mandatory for sixteen counties to set up poorhouses and permissive for thirty-eight others. Within a decade almost all the counties had adopted the new scheme.
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The workhouse system soon earned many enemies. A committee of the State Senate in 1856 described the poorhouses as
badly-constructed, ill-arranged, ill-warmed and ill-ventilated. The rooms are crowded with inmates; and the air, particularly in the sleeping departments, is very noxious, and to visitors, almost insufferable. In some cases, as many as forty-five inmates occupy a single dormitory, with low ceilings and sleeping boxes arranged in three tiers one above another.
Sickness was common and few workhouses had hospital facilities. The moral atmosphere was low since all kinds of people-male and female, insane and sane, crippled and able-bodied, diseased and well, vicious and virtuous-were crowded together in rooms and garrets. The keepers neglected their charges and permitted conditions that would shock hu- manity.
The committee urged the return to home relief, the removal of chil- dren and insane from the workhouses, better regulation of conditions, and constant supervision by the state of all charitable and reformatory insti- tutions. Unfortunately, the legislature did not adopt any of these recom- mendations until after the Civil War.
The reform movement was a powerful force shaping the lives of New Yorkers. Since almost all of the reform leaders were intensely religious, they felt that Providence was behind them and they also believed they were participating in the onward march of Progress. A relatively small group of clergymen and philanthropists dominated the various societies seeking to abolish slavery, Christianize the Polynesians, close the grog- shops, and the like. In the main, associates of Finney, who were carrying forward the work pioneered by Quakers, were in the vanguard of this movement.
The reformers won many victories despite their lack of numbers, their constant feuds, the hostility of conservatives and vested interests, and the indifference of the public. They themselves suffered several short- comings, including a lack of humor and, sometimes, a deficiency of com- mon sense. They often rushed to attack the results and not the causes of social evils. The individualistic tradition severely limited the possibilities of using collective solutions. Most important, the reformers found that an adolescent economy undergoing the stresses of industrialization could not afford to give all members of society a decent living.
Their achievements were nonetheless real and lasting. Many powerful organizations took root; the public was educated to demand improve- ments; public authorities recognized their responsibility to the handi- capped and dependent classes; the downtrodden and defenseless found leaders to champion their cause. The Empire State was taking the first faltering steps toward making adequate provisions for public welfare.
Chapter 25
Education and the Arts
The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders,
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