feeling and not tending to the basic needs of prisoners. The powerful group of men who came together through PSAMPP had no problem blaming the workingmen employed as jailers and turnkeys for the problems that marked the jail. When Quaker merchant Samuel Rowland Fisher was imprisoned by the British during the war, he had harsh words for the keeper of Philadelphia’s Old Stone Prison. Fisher described Stokeley Hossman as “the most unfeeling Man that I remember to have met with … a rough, hard-hearted Man.”8 Fisher criticized the actions of lesser, working-class men using the language of feeling—something Philadelphia’s elite began to do more and more after the war. The jailor who oversaw Walnut Street Jail in the 1780s, Mr. Reynolds, also resisted imposition of politicians and reformers. He ignored the demands of the Supreme Executive Council on a number of issues by refusing to admit ministers to preach and by not releasing pardoned prisoners who still owed fees. Reynolds claimed he took orders only from the sheriff—not from the state’s governing body and certainly not from a group of self-righteous humanitarians.9 For many years, Reynolds did a job no one wanted, for very little pay. He resented the half-hearted meddling and micromanagement offered by his betters. But right or wrong, they would ultimately prevail. Reynolds was accused of exploiting the broken system to the detriment of inmates for his own wealth, extorting extra fees for luxuries such as alcohol. By most official counts, he was corrupt and eventually removed from his position.
Inspectors wanted a keeper who embraced their ideas and gave up the penal ways of old. Reynold’s replacement, Elijah Weed, was popular among Inspectors because he supported their efforts. The keeper, long an officer charged with being tough and hard in superintendence of criminals, was now expected to embrace an authority anchored in sensibility and feeling. This partly explains why upon his death, Mary Weed, Elijah’s wife, was appointed to his position for a brief period despite the widespread disapproval of women’s involvement in prison work at that time.10 One visitor claimed, “The office of gaoler cannot be repugnant to the feelings of a well-inclined individual.”11 And so Inspectors felt it was a vital part of their job to instate a man of feeling at the top. One thing was clear to them: while a feeling man might become more feeling, and a hardened man might become more hardened, the two did not switch places. Even with a new keeper in place, they visited regularly.
Male reformers who served on the Visiting Committee of PSAMPP visited the prison weekly. While their official mission was to “alleviate the miseries” of the prison, the visits fulfilled other needs as well. Miseries were defined in terms of lack and excess: lack of clothing, bedding, food, and medical care along with too much freedom of movement, interaction with outsiders, and access to alcohol. Most obviously, the visits provided crucial emotional experiences for the men that enhanced their ability to feel sympathy and compassion for others. Progressive elite men believed that reform work gave them the opportunity to demonstrate sensitivity, generosity, and humanitarianism—in addition to cultivating their own sensibility.12 Benjamin Rush shared this sentiment in a letter to fellow reformer John Coakley Lettsom, “I have the pleasure of informing you that, from the influence of our Prison Society, a reformation has lately taken place in the jail of this city in favor not only of humanity but of virtue in general.” Proud of the impact of their work on others and themselves, Rush declared, “One thing is certain, that if no alleviation is given by them to human misery, men grow good by attempting it.”13 This emergence of feeling in the nineteenth century was vital. As Jan Lewis has argued, “To show feeling was to prove oneself fully alive.” But excessive compassion could be destructive. Reformers embraced opportunities to learn about the hardship of others but resisted getting drawn in too closely to others’ pain.14
The pardon became an important site of humanitarian intervention for this generation of reformers beginning in 1787. From this moment onward, men representing benevolent organizations would visit the prison and report their assessment of physically suffering individuals. They received petitions from prisoners begging for release and would determine whether or not they were worthy of recommendation to the governor for pardon. The system actually provided countless opportunities for strange men with authority granted by the governor to meddle in the lives of inmates—both men and women, predominantly poor. They would identify those individuals whom they deemed worthy of better care, support, or release. They would make formal recommendations to the governor or Supreme Executive Council and informal offerings of blankets, clothing, food, and prayers.15 The creation and expansion of institutionalized authority were accompanied by an increase in individual attention for specific prisoners from interested reformers who might mediate between them and the increasingly anonymous state. The organization’s impact was extraordinary. Shortly after its creation, PSAMPP was flooded with petitions from prisoners. Most petitions represented individual prisoners, although occasionally groups authored them as well. Prisoners pleaded with courts, reformers, and even the Supreme Executive Council of the state concerning a wide range of issues, from their inability to pay fines to their treatment at the hands of jailers. Individuals begged for forgiveness of court-imposed fines or prison fees that all too often were the only thing standing between them and freedom.
Men and women in prison articulated their needs in slightly different ways. By its very nature, the petition required recognition of one’s dependency and helplessness. For women, the genre was fitting—at least in theory. Just as gender norms requiring female dependency may have made it easy for reformers to assist female inmates, those same roles may have made it harder for women in prison—disproportionately impoverished—to pass the “character” tests rooted in social norms that were also raced and classed. PSAMPP concluded, for example, that Catherine Haas did not deserve their intervention because she was “of a bad character and since last visit was convicted and sentenced to hard labour in the work house.”16 For women, “bad character” was a catchall phrase for a wide range of behaviors, including cursing, prostitution, simple vagrancy, drunkenness, petty theft, or not showing proper deference to authorities. For men, an expression of submission might garner praise from reformers while undermining the men’s claim to citizenship in the new republic. The core qualities of the liberal subject—individual agency, accountability, and responsibility—were beyond the reach of men in prison, who were forced to beg their betters for help.17 The petitions served as highly gendered narratives of dependency.18 This vulnerable class of people negotiated dominant expectations regarding family life and gender roles while seeking the assistance of the reformers.
Progressive reformers did not have to look far for evidence of the harsh cruelty of the state, or of their own benevolence. Prisoner Elizabeth Donovan begged the reformers to rescue her from the “hard-hearted” keeper by “throwing” herself on their “bounty and goodness.”19 Elizabeth appealed to them through the lens of their growing philosophical commitment to a humanitarian sensibility that had been until recently a feminine pursuit. Donovan’s insistence that the reformers were the kind of virtuous gentlemen who could override the authority of the state (embodied by the wicked keeper) fueled their understanding of reform’s mission and affirmed their own sense of benevolence. Petitions further served to defend and justify penal authority in the first place. Prisoners did not call on revolutionary principles of justice or liberty or democracy in requesting assistance. Rather, they appealed to the reformer’s individual humanity, mercy, kindness, or charity.
Female inmates had to navigate dominant views of motherhood in their appeals. Susey Mines’ petition was filled with references to her family, although not the kind reformers would want to hear; a republican mother she was not. Mines blamed her daughter for her imprisonment and claimed she had no idea her daughter was stealing and then storing the items at her home. Mines wrote that she “would not permit her daughter or her goods inside of her doors” if she knew her daughter was a thief. Mines’s situation was not unusual, as many women were charged with possessing, receiving, or selling stolen goods rather than with actual theft. Once in prison, Mines wrote of her suffering in an exceptionally descriptive way, a practice more common among female than male petitioners. Mines emphasized the survival of her family and based her request for assistance on their needs. She stated that she had “a family [of] small distress[ed] children [to] provide for which are now in a most suffering condition and starved and cold winter
