rights, Northern states increasingly abolished slavery, and middling and elite women had more opportunities for formal education. As doors opened for the middling sorts, others belonging to the “lower sorts,” including vagrants, the poor, unskilled workers, the enslaved, bound servants, immigrants, free blacks, and servants, remained shut out. Poverty and its attendant life circumstances (homelessness, unemployment, living on streets, illness, begging, relying on religious or public charity) would threaten the American experiment more than the British military ever could. Those suffering greatly under the volatile economy of the early republic were targeted as the source of a social problem rather than result of an economic one. Elites believed that a faulty, outdated penal law contributed to chaos and lawlessness, inspiring a dedicated effort to transform official responses to the rebellions, crime, and poverty of the masses.
In Philadelphia, as in many other seaport cities, the compact design of neighborhoods put rich and poor in close proximity to each other. The density of Philadelphia and New York in 1800 was unparalleled in North America, with a population of 40,000 people per square mile compared to the national average of six.1 The two cities were becoming more like London—a city with 129,000 residents in just over one square mile in 1801—and less like anywhere else in the United States.2 Cities also had distinctly different demographic trends from their rural counterparts, including more free blacks, female heads of household, and young white men.3 The widespread reliance on enslaved, bound, or hired domestic help brought the laboring poor into the homes of middling and elite Philadelphians alike. Domestic workers who were enslaved or bound were treated as dependents and received housing and food as part of their arrangement—no small security in a city teeming with formerly enslaved and immigrant newcomers desperate for work and housing. But even this came at a price. Working women were generally denied the freedoms enjoyed by their male counterparts. If male laborers were viewed as “a footloose and potentially rebellious element in society,” the women who worked predominantly as hired or bound house servants were greatly restricted by the watchful eye of their employers, with whom they probably lived.4 Watchful or needy masters and mistresses scrutinized their comings and goings, demanded their constant availability, and subjected them to untold abuses.
The revolutionary promises of liberty and the opportunity to pursue happiness were not materializing for this group of servants and free laborers, leading many to seize them for themselves.5 Enslaved African Americans along with indentured servants and domestic workers of African, Irish, and English descent clamored for a taste of freedom from tyranny and suffering in their daily lives. They challenged the abuse and authority of masters, mistresses, and employers. They came together to share frustrations, aspirations, and plots. They ran away, disobeyed orders, threatened masters, and stole from the homes of their employers.6 Most significantly, they denied their labor to those who felt entitled to it, by custom and by law. Seeking their own piece of the revolution’s promise, this group upset the economic and social hierarchy. A majority of elite and middling Philadelphian households were dependent on the labor of this group and indulged in theatrical hyperbole when articulating their fears of and frustrations with such bold demonstrations of resistance. As a last resort, they turned to the state for help and had their servants or slaves imprisoned to punish them and regain control. The jail was freely used throughout the colonial era by slaveholders and masters of servants to punish them for not working hard enough, disobeying, or running away.7 The penitentiary would serve this same function in the post-Revolutionary period—but in a vastly expanded way.
The refusal of those enslaved or bound to work combined with the inability of others to find adequate employment put labor at the heart of social disorder in the decades following the war. Hard labor became the hallmark of a new system enacted through a series of laws passed between 1786 and 1794 that reduced the number of capital crimes, outlawed corporal punishment, and introduced imprisonment as the premier punishment. By reinstituting bound labor through punishment, elites aimed to discipline this recalcitrant workforce, exhort money for the state from their labor, and instill republican family values on the working poor. A strict sexual division of labor was imposed, requiring male convicts to clean the public streets while women worked behind closed doors. This was the first of many efforts to organize and segregate prisoners along lines of difference. Certain kinds of work were already more commonly associated with either men or women, but institutional labor regimes would exacerbate—even naturalize—these distinctions. Though the work of women in the eighteenth-century city was very diverse and often public, institutional labor regimes were narrow in scope and increasingly hidden. Prison labor not only foreshadowed but also accelerated the diminishing scope and value of women’s work more broadly by the mid-nineteenth century at the same time that more white women and free blacks were becoming household heads in Philadelphia, from 1790 to 1830.8
If labor served as a dead end for women, it offered the realization of the full potential of punishment exacted against men. The opportunity for structured, institutionalized labor might literally help transform convicts into workers.9 For men of all racial and ethnic groups, the prison initially offered the chance for reform. The opportunity to work in a manufactory was a path to redemption and even citizenship for men who embraced it. But for men who knew slavery, indentured servitude, impressment, and other systems of exploited labor, being forced to work without pay was not the olive branch it was touted to be.10 The penitentiary promised humane treatment, opportunity for quiet reflection, and religious counsel, in part to avoid comparisons to slavery.11 While moral reformation served as the ideological basis for the penitentiary, labor provided its economic justification. But the nature of work also produced its own ideologies, including the fortification of a heterosexual political economy that ensured women’s political and economic dependence on men, even though so many men proved unable or unwilling to be depended upon.
Public Punishment
A new era in punishment began when men dressed in blue and brown striped uniforms of coarse fabric and woolen caps took to the city streets with shovels, brooms, and wheelbarrows to make up for their crimes. Men who previously may have been pushed around the city from public square to public square in a cage, subject to whips, stones, and a good old public shaming were now expected to contribute to the greater good. When elite Philadelphian Ann Warder went out for a walk one spring day in 1787, she confronted a group of men cleaning the streets, harassing strangers, and begging for money. Warder wrote, “They have an iron collar around their neck and waist to which a long chain is fastened and at the end a heavy ball. As they proceed with their work this is taken up and thrown before them.”12 Warder complained about the situation and suggested that the guards needed to be more effective in preventing people from speaking to the prisoners—and giving them money.13 This scenario captures one of the many paradoxes of penal reform: public labor was instituted as punishment for lawlessness—and further contributed to public disorder and the discomfort of the city’s elite denizens in the process.
American reforms followed British policies in many ways, including public punishment. Even before debates over public punishment in Pennsylvania flooded the papers, evidence from the British experiment with the practice was printed in the Pennsylvania Gazette. The late Dr. Fothergill had argued that if the purpose of public punishment was to deter as much as to punish, the condemned should be paraded in front of those most likely to offend.14 He added, “I do not mean, however, that they should go at large, though in chains and with keepers. They should be kept as much as possible from all converse with the public, and yet be seen by them.” Fothergill identified the challenge of encouraging visibility while denying communication. Public punishment in Pennsylvania differed from its British counterpart in that it paraded convicts through the middle of crowded city streets rather than restricting them to labor on the wharves, away from public view.
Public labor was authorized by the 1786 Act to Amend the Penal Laws of the State, the first major penal reform bill passed after independence. The popular bill was devised under the rule of Pennsylvania’s radical constitution of 1776 and passed into law a decade later by the liberal Constitutionalists then in power, signaling widespread support for the bill’s
