to elicit sympathy for criminals from an unsuspecting public.37 Rush believed that sympathy and compassion misdirected at prisoners laboring in public would be socially disastrous – inspiring rage at the state for inflicting punishment and possibly deadening sympathy for those truly worthy.38 When Rush delivered these ideas before a meeting of the Society for Promoting Political Inquiries at Benjamin Franklin’s house on March 9, 1787, those in attendance enthusiastically embraced his critique.39 Rush’s lecture and its dissemination in printed form would inspire and shape public debate on the subject for years, until the law was repealed in 1790. His arguments incited fear in lawyers, judges, and reformers that convicts working in chains in the city streets would elicit excessive or improper emotions in its citizens. Further, he feared that harsh punishments led to a hardened people—exactly the opposite of what he aspired to for himself and his community.40
Public punishment was by all counts a disaster. It made the city seem less safe rather than more safe. It was not crime itself, however, that created social chaos but rather ineffective punishment. It inspired an expansion of policing efforts that ultimately targeted the poor. It is easy to cite Rush’s essay as the basis for abandoning public punishment, but to do so obscures the impact of actual rebellion, violence, and disorder. Rush’s ideas about the confused emotions and moral corruption of innocent bystanders changed the conversation from one of the real resistance and violence of the wheelbarrow men to a more distant intellectual exercise in hypothetical interactions. Looking back on the end of public punishment, reformer Caleb Lownes centered his critique on the prisoners themselves, noting how punishment failed to reform them. Lownes plainly states, “Disgraceful labour or treatment of any kind, it has not had, nor can have, any valuable tendency towards restoring an offender to usefulness in society, and it is therefore discontinued.”41 This most public, visible, and physical of punishments failed because those targeted refused to internalize its lessons. Public punishment did not instigate an appropriate response in the hearts and minds of the prisoners, regardless of its emotional impact on citizens.
The actions of the wheelbarrow men and the public debates over the significance of this policy obscured the existence of women in prison. While the rhetoric up to this point suggests that men alone were the targets of penal reform measures, this was simply not the case. Ample evidence shows women laboring away in a workhouse during this period. In 1787, the Acting Committee of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons (PSAMPP) reported that women in the workhouse were busy “spinning &c. and making shifts for the men.”42 A workhouse calendar from 1789 confirms that female convicts, vagrants, and runaways worked side by side, including three women who were convicted of stealing.43 Anyone who read the Pennsylvania Gazette would be reminded of the women in prison by the advertisements that asked for “Any old blankets, shoes, stockings, mens and womens apparel” to be delivered to the prison.44 From 1787 through 1790, women constituted anywhere from 10.4 to 21.9 percent of the convict population and nearly half of all inmates when vagrants and runaways were included.45 There are a number of reasons women were not ordered to labor in the street alongside men.
Women and men were distinct entities under English common law. The legal and social distinctions between men and women were deemed to be a substantive basis for different treatment by the courts. This distinction was adopted by the American legal system and remained in place well into the late nineteenth century, designated by the phrase “from the consideration of her sex.”46 Married men were responsible for the actions of their wives. Women who broke the law were at times given the benefit of the doubt before the courts, assuming that they were under the influence of a man. Women who broke the law were simply less significant than men who did the same. They were already held in the lowest regard by male judges, reformers, and elites. There was no need to make a spectacle of them through public shaming because women in prison were believed to be already disgraced. Furthermore, the public shaming of dissolute women might further taint the public viewing the spectacle. And so most reformers were content to assess the effectiveness of the penal law as it pertained to men. In his characterization of the failure of public punishment, Rush focused solely on the wheelbarrow men. In a 1787 letter to New York reformer John Coakley Lettsom, Rush wrote, “From the experience of our citizens of the bad effects of our wheelbarrow law (as ’tis called), it will probably be repealed. This I hope will pave the way for the adoption of solitude and labor as the means of not only punishing but reforming criminals.”47 Rush, like most others, ignored the impact of the law on women in prison, quite possibly presuming that it did not have any.
But the fact that public punishment was not applied to women had lasting consequences. Chiefly, it ensured that the dominant public perception of criminality was male. Convict men were hypervisible in both the streets and the press as wheelbarrow men raised havoc, resisted authority, and made great escapes. While the behavior of prisoners was cited as a significant reason for the abolition of public labor in 1790, it was actually the behavior of male prisoners that necessitated the change. The failure of public punishments inspired reforms that dramatically affected prisoners of both sexes for decades—even centuries—to come. The four years of public punishment (1786–1790) were critical for marking the male body as the physical embodiment of criminality and transforming the meaning and function of punishment.48 They inspired the adoption of punishment by hard labor in a far more controllable, predictable environment—behind the walls of the penitentiary.
Runaways
Wheelbarrow men were not the only group to resist order, discipline, or punishment in the streets, institutions, and homes of the city. Five women escaped from prison in 1796. Three white women, Pricilla Roberts, Catherine Lynch, and Joan Holland, made it all the way to Baltimore before being recaptured.49 Two others, African American Phebe Mines and Irish Margaret McGill, also escaped through the dungeon and into Sixth Street with the group as well.50 Women also regularly contested the terms of their employment, indenture, enslavement, and imprisonment. They negotiated with employers, resisted masters, and sometimes escaped altogether. The 1780s and 1790s were record decades for enslaved and bound workers rising up against authorities in seeking freedom. From 1780 to 1789, in the city of Philadelphia alone, over four hundred enslaved people either were manumitted or ran away.51 In the 1790s, more bound servants and enslaved people were imprisoned for running away or standing up to abusive masters than ever before.52 Women who were caught running away or resisting the terms of their employment constituted the largest single category of those charged with vagrancy—as one-third of all vagrants in 1795.53 As news spread of the Haitian Revolution in which enslaved blacks took up arms against their oppressors, African Americans were inspired to believe that they too could free themselves from the bonds of slavery.
Advertisements for runaway servants, enslaved people, and escaped convicts used nearly identical language and formats, signaling the groups were held in similarly low regard. People placed ads to announce and describe those who ran away, often calling for someone to deliver the runaway person to the nearest jail if captured.54 When an enslaved woman named Dina ran away in search of freedom, she had not committed any crime. For innocent enslaved and convicted people in search of freedom, the ads usually ended with a line similar to the one concerning Dina: “Whoever takes up said Negroe Woman and secures her in any gaol, so that her master may have her again, shall have THREE POUNDS reward, and reasonable charges, if brought home, paid by David Carson.”55 Readers were thus encouraged to identify, capture, and transport runaway servants and slaves to the prison for holding—treating them as criminals. While an increasing number of Pennsylvanians supported the abolition of slavery by 1780, many people still felt differently when it came to their own servants or slaves. Even leading prison reformers who were antislavery advocates were content to accept this function of the prison as a place to contain those seeking freedom.
Vagrancy laws provided the legal justification for the imprisonment of runaways. They were loosely defined yet powerful tools used to reassert social and economic hierarchies. The vagrancy records themselves did not distinguish clearly between servant and slave when
