American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

Of the score or more grievances proclaimed in their Seneca Falls declaration, middle-class women often felt most keenly their status as legally inferior in marriage. The wife “is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming…her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.” Feminists were outraged by the common law, under which a married woman was unable to contract with her husband or with third parties, could not convey real or personal property to or from her husband, and hence by extension could not lawfully engage in trade without her husband’s consent. While some of the harsher applications of common law were being corrected through equity jurisprudence on a state-by-state basis, the wife’s relationship to her husband was much like that of ward to guardian.

  Despite the handicaps a woman assumed thereby, nearly all of them did marry: save as homemakers and housekeepers, how could they keep themselves? Perhaps by teaching school, but these positions were limited. Spinsters usually stayed at home to care for elderly parents, or paid for their keep by domestic labor in the kitchens of brothers and sisters. Marriages were permanent, if only because the alternative was hardly thinkable. Divorce was almost impossible; in many states it required a special legislative petition, as did Rachel Robards Jackson’s divorce. In most cases a woman relinquished property, home, and children to her ex-husband. While feminists had made some progress by mid-century in improving the status of married women—Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton helped persuade New York to recognize a wife’s right to her separate property—divorce remained almost immune to major reform.

  For many middle-class women, the main block to self-realization was less the law than social and psychological circumstance. For some, rising affluence, and the goods and comforts that came with it, elevated their feelings of need rather than satisfied them. Family duties in particular barred them from rewarding occupations and professions. Millicent Leib Hunt in Detroit rebelled against her domestic chores, assuaging her anger by writing in a diary about her duty. She tried to deny her “selfish” wishes for pretty clothes. Of her husband she vowed “never to oppose his opinions but by gentle and affectionate reasoning.” She would always “offer him the choicest morsels at table” and manifest a “quick and ready compliance with his wishes.”

  For a time, Lydia Maria Child seemed immune to this kind of problem. In her early twenties, she published two popular novels, earning a literary reputation. At thirty-one she wrote a tract, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, electrifying the antislavery world, but it lost her sales on her popular writing. Boston exacted its sternest penalty when the Atheneum canceled her free membership. Moving from Boston to New York, she edited during the 1840s the National Anti-Slavery Standard, a militant weekly. In her newspaper writings and numerous letters she displayed a penetrating intelligence and unusual compassion. She commented on everything—on the machinations of compromising party politicians, on abolitionist backsliders, on Fourier (“I think Fourier means that society ought to be so constructed that every passion will be excited by healthy action on suitable objects”), on the failings of the “Swig” hard-cider party, and always on the flowers and birds and trees that she loved. She knew and influenced the movers and shakers of reform.

  But Lydia Maria Child was married—to David Lee Child, who shared her concerns and passions but apparently was frustrated in his own career and dependent on his wife. By 1850 she was writing a friend that the “experience of the last eight years has terribly shaken my faith in human nature” and “my own strong and electric nature.” She had all along hoped, she wrote two years later, after retiring to the country, that the time would come when household work and cares would leave her enough time to earn something again by writing. “But what with cooking, taking care of milk, making butter, picking and preparing vegetables, keeping the house tolerably clean, washing dishes, seeing that nothing moulds, ferments or freezes, ironing clothes, making and mending clothes, for myself and David, &c. &c. I find that the treadmill never stops.…Six weeks often passes without my even looking into a book or touching a pen.”

  This was the vibrant voice of a middle-class woman. A few years earlier, Mehitable Eastman had spoken with equal feeling for working-class women: “Never while we have hearts to feel and tongues to speak will we silently and passively witness so much that is opposed to justice and benevolence…never, while we are conscious of powers undeveloped, affections hemmed in, energies paralyzed, privileges denied, usefulness limited, honors forfeited, and destiny thwarted…” Powers undeveloped, destiny thwarted—here spoke the authentic voice for the unfulfilled needs of women. But how could awareness of these needs be raised to a higher level of consciousness—and to a broader economic and political effort? It is a curious irony of life that the same conditions that create a potential for us and create our awareness of that potential, are the same conditions that stand most powerfully in the path of realizing that potential.

  MIGRANTS IN POVERTY

  When Frances Wright made her first trip to the United States, the voyage could hardly have been more pleasant, considering the conditions of ocean travel at that time. The twenty-three-year-old orphan and heiress was neither nervous nor seasick during the month-long crossing. She liked the kindly, weather-beaten old captain, the cheerful and obliging crew. Her ship—the American-owned packet Amity—was well named, she felt, as she never heard a dispute on board save for one evening when a young Scotsman fell into an argument with an older Englishman over the question of grace and predestination. She listened for a while, but “in the middle of a nicely drawn distinction on the part of the Englishman, between foreknowing and fore decreeing, I fell asleep, and waked to no other noise than the creaking of timber and lashing of the waves.”

  Arrival in New York Harbor was even more pleasant. She stared in admiration at the “magnificent bay, whose broad and silver waters, sprinkled with islands, are so finely closed by the heights of the Narrows, which, jutting forward with a fine sweeping bend, give a circular form to the immense basin which receives the waters of the Hudson,” the purity of the air, the “forest of masts crowded round the quays and wharfs at the entrance of the East River.” She was much taken by the young men, as she saw them tall and slender and agile, their large white shirt collars unbuttoned and thrown back on their shoulders, their broad-brimmed hats shading their handsome, sunburned faces, who rowed out in the fast little boats to greet the Amity. She was even more pleased by the many active tars who sprang from the yards and rigging of nearby ships to help the passengers land, seemingly satisfied with a kind “thank ye.” Soon she was having tea and fruit in a boardinghouse and hearing with astonishment the chorus of katydids, crickets, and tree frogs outside.

  Steerage life on the Oxford, a British cargo ship loaded with immigrants, was less appealing. The captain had packed three hundred people into rough pine bunks. Having prudently brought their own bedding and food, the immigrants lived below-decks for the forty or so days of passage, amid the fetid squalor of cooking food, tobacco smoke, straw mattresses, offal. If the Oxford passengers were unlucky, their death rate from typhus, cholera, or smallpox would be more than 10 percent, and they would risk death or injury when fire broke out from a man’s pipe or a cook’s candle. They paid fifteen or twenty dollars for the journey, compared with Frances Wright’s “thirty guineas, wines included.”

  Debarkation in New York Harbor was a jolting experience for the immigrants. The Oxford had no sooner tied up at the dock than scores of rough-looking men who called themselves “runners” swarmed onto the ship to “help” the passengers with their luggage but in fact tried to inveigle them to boardinghouses that had promised the runners so much a head. On arriving at the boardinghouse the immigrant might be turned away, or robbed, or given false promises of employment. On the side, the runners profited greatly by stealing trunks from passengers—a game called “Trunkeloo”—and selling them “first class” canalboat tickets that turned out to be the w
orst accommodations on the slowest craft. It was to this aspect of American private enterprise that newcomers were first introduced.

  The poorest of the poor immigrants—except for Africans, worse off than poor—were the Irish peasants who fled disease and death in the famine-ridden southern counties of Cork, Kerry, Galway, and Clare after 1835. They and others from the British Isles constituted about three-fourths of the 220,000 immigrants from Europe to the United States between 1815 and 1830. Immigration then soared; 2,500,000 people arrived between 1830 and 1850. During the fifties another 2,750,000 immigrants came; almost half of these were Irish. The Germans, the largest nationality group after the Irish, were more often skilled mechanics or thriving farmers who soon moved on to the Ohio Valley or Great Lakes region. The Irish were likely to stay in New York or eventually to work their way toward other cities in the Northeast.

  New York was the big port of entry, for immigration routes tended to follow the shipping lanes. Most newcomers moved at once to neighborhoods where their fellow countrypeople lived, often settling in tenements abandoned by the slightly less impoverished. Needing to be close to work and lacking public transportation, immigrants flooded into tenement areas and shanty towns in lower Manhattan. Houses built for single families became multi-family, surrounded by flimsy new dwellings in backyards and alleys. The density of the seven lower wards of Manhattan rose from about 95 to about 164 people per acre between 1820 and 1850. By the end of the 1840s, 29,000 persons were living in cellars.

  Fleeing poverty in the old country, plunged into squalor in the new, the newcomers struggled for jobs. New Jersey contractors recruited construction gangs among the Irish of New York City, and for sixty cents a day tens of thousands labored from sunrise to sunset in the swampy, disease-ridden lowlands. Some laborers turned to liquor, which was often near at hand because New Jersey contractors liked to pay off in whiskey. A doctor visiting New Jersey canal workers found a man in delirium. Was he in the “habit of drinking ardent spirits?” the doctor asked. “Nothing more than the allowance,” the man said. The allowance turned out to be five glasses per day.

  Some of these new Americans, brought up in country towns and villages, could not cope with urban conditions and fled. Others fought, or drank. Some sought help and stayed.

  A little aid came from local authorities concerned for immigrants mistreated, scorned, and swindled—to the amount of an estimated $2,500,000 in one year alone in New York City. After decades of abuse on the docks, the city commissioner of immigration leased an old fort at the foot of Manhattan known as Castle Garden and restricted immigrants to this one landing. Here, officials gave the newcomers travel advice, helped safeguard their belongings, aided them with lodging problems, and sold them valid tickets to their destinations. Immigrants also received a helping hand from families from the “old country” who had settled before them, and from their churches and church societies. Irish laborers turned to Irish contractors for jobs and loans. Mutual assistance and dependency bound the immigrant communities more and more tightly together.

  In spite of the newcomers’ initial response to the need to survive which had forced them together, forming what could be characterized as tribal affiliations along ethnic and extended-family lines, however, the undertow of expanding potential for industrial and commercial enterprise was strong enough to provide impetus for reconstructing the class structure within the immigrant community. It was no coincidence that the notion of the “reserve army of the unemployed” arose during this period of intense competition, which characterized the supply side of the labor market at a time of meteoric expansion.

  When the New Jersey canal workers struck against pay cuts and inhuman working conditions, the state militia moved in, a riot followed, and the strike leaders were jailed. Contractors brought in strike breakers from Manhattan to replace the malcontents. When canal work was completed, many of these Irish, striker and strike breaker alike, settled in nearby New Jersey towns, swelling the labor force of rising industrial cities like Newark and Trenton.

  Immigrants who stayed in the city scrounged for jobs at the bottom of the pile. Blacks and whites competed not only for jobs on the docks but for menial jobs, serving New York’s wealthy. WANTED, read an advertisement in the New York Herald: “A cook, Washer, and Ironer, who perfectly understands her business; any color or country except Irish.” Many Irish worked in the clothing trades either in large warehouse-type factories or in piecework at home. Almost thirty thousand women, Irish and otherwise, made clothes, often working twelve to fifteen hours a day for thirty or thirty-five cents. A seamstress might produce six pairs of pants during the week and bring her bundle to a merchant’s door, to receive only $2.35.

  In the eyes of many middle-class whites, the inner-city immigrants were mere paupers. Many, indeed, were paupers. Often society’s response was to group the poor with the crippled, diseased, helpless, dying—and to isolate as many as possible. For this purpose, New York had put up the largest structure in the city, an imposing gray-stone fortress called Bellevue, developed from a “Publick Workhouse and House of Correction” commissioned in 1734. The site had been purchased by the city in 1811 and was enclosed on three sides by an eleven-foot wall, with a fourth side bounded by the East River. Bellevue was built by debtors and convicts to warehouse the afflicted.

  In 1860 the Bellevue Hospital Medical College, the first of its kind in the United States, was added but during the 1830s and 1840s the complex consisted of a penitentiary where paupers lived, two hospitals, a bakery, icehouse, greenhouse, soap factory, stables, and the city fire station. Here from one to four thousand feeble, diseased, and dying vagrants were put or took refuge at various times. Despite efforts by city officials to maintain order and cleanliness, smells of sickness and death pervaded the buildings.

  As so often happens in institutions, a kind of class system prevailed. The superintendent separated paupers according to sex, health, “character,” and race. Blacks were incarcerated in the dark and noisome cellars of the penitentiary. No marriages or promiscuity was tolerated, in theory at least, nor was idleness allowed. Work, indeed, was considered the moral and practical cure for pauperism; hence the city installed a treadmill in Bellevue to force the poor to move heavy grindstones. All paupers had to work in the gardens, bakery, or factory buildings in order to provide their own food and clothing. Disobedient inmates lost meal privileges; they were assigned extra workloads or thrown into solitary confinement in the “Dark Room” on bread and water; or had to wear “an iron wing around their leg, with a chain and wooden block fixed thereto.”

  Bellevue housed many children. Schoolteachers, sent by the Free School Society of New York City, taught young inmates spelling, reading, writing, and “the principles of religion and morality.” A Protestant minister was in attendance too, paid by the city to teach old and young alike and especially Irish Catholic immigrants the virtues of industry and sobriety.

  Feeling isolated and beleaguered in a hard, punitive, work-oriented society, many immigrants turned back into their communal life—to their churches, schools, benevolent societies, social organizations. And they turned to politics. The Irish often took the lead on this score, not having to cope with a foreign language and having well-developed political instincts after a century of dealing with the English in their mother country. Banded together, soon they were electing city councilmen, who then might use the dole or outdoor relief to build support among the poor. They turned more and more to Tammany Hall, which during Jacksonian days was taking positions on such popular issues as abolition of imprisonment for debt and was distributing food and clothing to the immigrants and the poor of New York City while doling out patronage. By the 1840s, the stage was set for a showdown within Tammany between its remaining Protestant leaders, who still harked back to the old Jeffersonian days, and the rising Irish.

  This conflict came to a head in l841; when a young Irishman named Mike Walsh challenged Tammany. Born in Ireland twenty-six years earlier, Mike had
emigrated with his parents, who had apprenticed him to a printer. Rowdy and hard-drinking, Walsh had a talent for organization and a flair for leadership. His virtues, however, were not appreciated by the older Protestant leaders of Tammany, who saw him and his Irish battalions as a threat to their control. When the nominating committee of the Democratic party refused to choose Mike for a seat in the state legislature, he decided to appeal to the people at the county meeting. And when the committee there asked him not to speak, he threw down his hat from the platform and demanded to be heard. He had his “Spartan Band” with him to lend support.

  To mingled shouts of “Go it, Mike” and “Turn him out,” he warned that he and his followers could disrupt other speeches if he was not allowed to give his own. In the end, the meeting rejected Walsh’s candidacy, but he continued to organize the Irish workingmen. In 1843 he founded his own newspaper, the Subterranean, where he carried on his abrasive brand of politics, going to jail twice for libel. Later in the decade he won the Tammany nomination for state legislator, and a few years after that he gained a seat in Congress, where he remained a spokesman for the poor. “The only difference between the negro slave of the South and the white wage slave of the North,” he told an icily hostile House, “is that the one has a master without asking for him, and the other has to beg for the privilege of becoming a slave.”

  Many an immigrant who gave up the fight in the inner city and found a job on the canals or with the railroads or fled west could not escape conflict and discrimination. In 1842, Irish coal miners fought blacks in Pennsylvania for mining jobs; a decade later, armed black strike breakers replaced Irishmen on the Erie Railroad.

  Some cities seemed more kindly than others to immigrants and other “paupers.” Philadelphia appeared more hospitable than Boston, in part because in that city, whose 300,000 inhabitants in 1840 more than doubled in the next twenty years, there were many jobs available. Mill towns on water-power sites outside the city had robbed Boston of some of its industry. Boston was also the city still of the Puritan. Bostonians were the loudest in talking about rights and abolition, but there as elsewhere orphan girls at the age of ten were bound out to wealthy families for eight years to do menial household labor. Mistresses expected such servant girls to be up at five and ready to labor until eleven in the evening six days a week, with one-half day on Sunday for rest.