Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (83 page)

Consequently, they were eager to create charitable and humanitarian societies. Indeed, more humanitarian societies were formed in the decade following the Revolution than were created in the entire colonial period.
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New England saw a virtual explosion of philanthropic organizations in the post-Revolutionary years. During the colonial period and prior to the formation of the Constitution in 1787, New Englanders had founded only seventy-eight charitable associations, most of these located in Boston. But with the new emphasis on people’s moral sense and feelings of benevolence, things soon changed. In the decade following 1787, New Englanders formed 112 charitable societies; between 1798 and 1807, 158 more; and between 1808 and 1817, 1,101—creating in three decades nearly fourteen hundred benevolent organizations scattered in small towns all over the region.
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These associations were self-conscious replacements for traditional acts of individual and private charity, which were now described as impulsive and arbitrary. By organizing “upon a system; which inquires, deliberates, and feels a responsibility to the public,” the charitable associations, declared the Reverend Edward Dorr Griffin of Massachusetts in 1811, were “the best repository of our gifts” and far more effective than the “little and widely scattered streams of individual munificence.”
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Because the Federalist and Republican elites who created these institutions saw them as simply extensions of their public role as leaders of the society, they described them as public institutions designed to promote the public good. But as the state lost control of its creations and the idea of a unitary public good lost its coherence, these and other such organizations, like the chartered colleges, came to be regarded as private. These kinds of humanitarian and charitable associations represented the beginnings of what today is labeled “a civil society”—constituting the thousands of institutions and organizations that stand between the individual and the government. This emerging civil society in the early Republic was the major means by which Americans were able, to some extent at least, to tame and manage the near anarchic exuberance of their seething, boisterous society.

Voluntary associations in the early Republic sprang up to meet every human need—from the New York “Society for the Promotion of the Manumission of Slaves and Protecting such of them that have been or may be Liberated” to the Philadelphia “Society for the Relief of the Poor and Distressed Masters of Ships, their Widows and Children.” There were mechanic societies, humane societies, societies for the prevention of pauperism, orphan asylums, missionary societies, marine societies, tract societies, Bible societies, temperance associations, Sabbatarian groups, peace societies,
societies for the suppression of vice and immorality, societies for the relief of poor widows, societies for the promotion of industry, indeed, societies for just about anything and everything that was good and humanitarian.
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Some of these organizations, like the many immigrant aid societies that emerged in the cities, had social as well as humanitarian purposes. But most were charitable societies initially organized by paternalistic urban elites like John Jay, Noah Webster, and Benjamin Rush to deal with all the human miseries their newly aroused benevolent consciences told them they had an obligation to ease. These multiplying societies treated the sick, aided the industrious poor, housed orphans, fed imprisoned debtors, built huts for shipwrecked sailors, and, in the case of the Massachusetts Humane Society, even attempted to resuscitate those suffering from “suspended animation,” that is, those such as drowning victims who appeared to be dead but actually were not. The fear of being buried alive was a serious concern at this time. Many, like Washington on his deathbed, asked that their bodies not be immediately interred in case they might be suffering from suspended animation.

In 1788 Dr. Rush had told the clergy that, whatever their doctrinal differences, “you are all united in inculcating the necessity of morals,” and “from the success or failure of your exertions in the cause of virtue, we anticipate the freedom or slavery of our country.” It was a message repeated over and over during the subsequent decades. Faced with such an awesome responsibility to inculcate morality, religious groups and others responded to the cause with an evangelical zeal and clamor that went beyond what Rush or anyone else in 1788 could have imagined. All the clergy came to realize that they could no longer rely on exposing the community’s guilt through jeremiads; they could no longer count on reforming merely the “better part” of the society in the expectation that it would bring the rest along; and they could no longer just use government to create the right “moral effect.” Ordinary people themselves had to be mobilized in the cause of virtue, through the creation of local moral societies, which in 1812 the great New England evangelical preacher Lyman Beecher labeled “disciplined moral militia.”
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Middling members of these multiplying moral societies, which were at first often confined to rural villages, relied essentially on observation and the force of local public opinion. Members who were eager to support “the suppression of vice,” such as the members of the Moral Society of the County of Columbia in New York in 1815, united to achieve that goal. They collected “the lovers of virtue of every name” and presented “a bold front to the growing licentiousness of the day”; and then, by erecting “a citadel, from which extended observations may be made,” they exerted their “influence over the moral conduct of others,” first by friendly persuasion, and then, if that did not work, by exposing the moral delinquents “to the penalties of law.” The hopes were high: “character, that dearest earthly interest of man, will thus be protected, and thousands who are now settling down into incurable habits of licentiousness, will by these means be reclaimed.”
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The growing and sprawling cities, however, needed more than moral societies to watch over and intimidate people. They needed new and substantial institutions, such as relief societies, hospitals, free schools, prisons, and savings banks, to improve the character of the weak and vicious of the society. The proliferation in the early nineteenth century of these new institutions eventually transformed and often eclipsed the humanitarian societies that enlightened gentry had formed in the immediate post-Revolutionary years in response to feelings of republican benevolence. All of these new institutions became parts of an expanding civic society.

By the second decade of the nineteenth century the goals and social complexion of these earlier urban philanthropic endeavors were changing. Ordinary middling sorts of people, usually pious newcomers from rural areas, were replacing the older paternalistic gentry as leaders of these charitable societies. In doing so, they transformed the emotional bonds tying them to the objects of their benevolence, substituting moral rectitude for gratitude.

The patrician gentry in the 1780s and 1790s had organized charitable societies for treating the sick, aiding widowed mothers, housing orphans, feeding imprisoned debtors, or resuscitating drowning victims out of a sense of Christian stewardship and paternalistic compassion befitting their genteel social position. They often seemed more interested in what their benevolence could do for their own feelings than for what it could do for the objects of their compassion. “How glorious, how God-like, to step forth to the relief of . . . distress,” declared the twenty-four-year-old
DeWitt Clinton, a Columbia graduate, newly installed Freemason, and nephew of the governor of New York, in a 1793 oration. Enlightened caring gentry like Clinton wanted nothing more than “to arrest the tear of sorrow; to disarm affliction of its darts; to smooth the pillow of declining age; to rescue from the fangs of vice the helpless infant, and to diffuse the most lively joys over a whole family of rational, immortal creatures.”
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Paternalistic acts of charity by gentry like Clinton were disinterested deeds of sympathy for people whose character or behavior they did not expect to change fundamentally. All they expected was feelings of dependency and gratitude on the part of the recipients.

It was not gratitude, however, that the middle-class founders of the new reform institutions were interested in or expected. The new reformers wanted to imbue people not with deference and dependency but with “correct moral principles”; they aimed to change the actual behavior of people. These middling reformers had transformed themselves, often by strenuous efforts at self-improvement and hard work. Why couldn’t others do the same? The compassionate charity of the paternalistic gentry, they believed, did not get at the heart of the problem of poverty. Indeed, in some cases they thought it aggravated the problem; many claimed, for example, that giving charity indiscriminately to the poor only perpetuated poverty. “Do not give to persons able to work for a living,” declared a critic of the traditional paternalistic charity in 1807. “Do not support widows who refuse to put out their children. Do not let the means of support be made easier to one who does not work than to those who do.”
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Instead of merely relieving the suffering of the unfortunate, as the earlier paternalistic gentry and benevolent associations had done, the new middle-class reformers sought to create institutions that would get at the sources of poverty, crime, and other social evils, mainly by suppressing the vices—gambling, drinking, Sabbath-breaking, profanity, horse racing, and other expressions of profligacy—that presumably were causing the evils. The middle-class moral reformers sought to remove the taverns and betting houses that tempted the weak and impressionable and to create institutions, such as schools and reformatory-type prisons, that would instill in people a proper respect for morality. Many of the middling reformers began attacking the sexual license and the spread of bastardy that had characterized the immediate post-Revolutionary decades. “The prostitution of women, which prevails to a high degree in all large cities,” wrote publisher Mathew Carey in 1797, in one of the first writings
on behalf of prostitution reform, “might be lessened by giving them encouragement to enter into various occupations which are available to them.” But, said Carey, even more important than jobs in keeping women from prostitution was religion, especially “instruction of First-day or Sunday schools.”
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MERICANS DID NOT CONFINE
their spirit of reform to just the United States and its own citizens. Throughout the period they created numerous missionary societies to bring the Bible and assorted tracts, schoolbooks, testaments, and other devotional literature to the heathen, first in the North American continent and then eventually in the farthest reaches of the globe. In 1787 the state of Massachusetts established the Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians and Others in North America. Over the next thirty years a score of other major state and regional missionary societies were created, most of them supported by private bequests. The New York Missionary Society, formed in 1796, was the first voluntary interdenominational organization designed to propagate the gospel among the Indians. In 1801 the Connecticut assembly in association with the Presbyterian-inclined clergy of Connecticut adopted a Plan of Union that encouraged missionaries to the new settlements in the West and elsewhere to come together with the Congregationalists for their mutual benefit. Most of these missionary societies published journals and magazines to raise money and to keep the reforming spirit alive. In 1802 a group of Boston women formed the Cent Institution and agreed to deposit one cent a week in mite boxes for the purpose of “purchasing Bibles, Dr. Watts Psalms and Hymns, Primers, Catechisms, Divine Songs, Tokens for Children, etc.,” which would be distributed by the Massachusetts Missionary Society that had been established in 1799.
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Soon, however, the goals of these missionary societies expanded beyond the North American continent, especially as the spread of French infidelity seemed to threaten the future of Christianity throughout the world. In 1804 the Massachusetts Missionary Society began to look outside of America for converts; the Cent Institution now saw itself “engaged in sending the gospel to lands unenlightened with its genial rays,” wherever they might be. So popular did the idea of women’s mite societies become
that English reformers picked it up. Indeed, throughout this period the American missionary societies, most of which were in New England, maintained strong ties and correspondence with their British counterparts; and thus most were appropriately Anglophile Federalists. Soon the women of Massachusetts were raising several thousand dollars annually for missions in lands as distant as Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, India, and the South Seas.
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In 1810 a group of enthusiasts formed the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions that became for the next half century the largest organization devoted to sending benevolent workers abroad. The organizers justified their efforts by the oneness of humanity and need to bring the promise of Christian salvation to benighted souls everywhere. But the foreign missions were not just a religious responsibility; they were, the sponsors declared, a peculiar American responsibility. The United States above all other countries, they said, had the means and the message to bring republican civilization to the world.
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ROBABLY THE HUMANITARIAN REFORM
that attracted the most worldwide attention was the Americans’ effort to create new systems of criminal punishment. Since the colonial authorities had considered the lower orders incapable of restraining their passions by themselves, they had concluded that potential criminals could be controlled only through fear or force. Hence pillorying, whipping, and mutilating of the criminals’ bodies had been standard punishments in the colonies, and carrying out these bodily punishments in public in front of local communities presumably had possessed the added benefit of overawing and deterring the spectators. Men and women in eighteenth-century Boston were taken from the huge cage that had brought them from the prison, tied bareback to a post on State Street, and lashed thirty or forty times “amid the screams of the culprits and the uproar of the mob.”
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