Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [122]
In New Amsterdam, the care of the indigent had been left to the city’s religious bodies. In New York, this approach seemed less and less satisfactory as the seventeenth century drew to a close. Not only were the numbers of poor people rising, but on both sides of the Atlantic poverty as such was increasingly regarded as an aspect of the general problem of labor discipline. In the comprehensive Settlement Act of 1662, Parliament prohibited the indigent from seeking relief outside their native parishes and drew up precise classifications of poverty to prevent the able-bodied from evading work. The New York Assembly followed Parliament’s lead in 1683 with the first colony-wide measure “for Maintaining the Poor and Preventing Vagabonds.” The law combined relief for needy residents of every community with provisions for the prompt eviction of newcomers who lacked visible means of support (to which end it also required ship captains to give the magistrates a list of all their passengers). Because each town and county had to maintain its own poor, governor Dongan remarked, “no vagrants, beggars, nor idle person” would be allowed in the colony.
The poor didn’t go away, though. In 1685, at Dongan’s urging, the Common Council ordered the aldermen of each ward to identify their “deserving poor”—established residents who had fallen on hard times through no fault of their own—and for the first time accepted the responsibility to provide “for their Reliefe out of the publique Treasury.” This decision was affirmed in the Ministry Act of 1693, which created a special tax known as the “poor rate” and made the proceeds available to five “overseers of the poor” or “churchwardens” (secular officials, despite the name). So-called outdoor relief, or outrelief, the most common form of aid, involved grants of fuel, clothing, food, and even cash. Persons unable to care for themselves could be boarded with families. In New York City, the very sick and infirm were placed in an almshouse on Broad Street, the first of a succession of private residences that the corporation rented for this purpose after 1700. Denied assistance of any kind were nonresidents and all able-bodied persons judged fit to work for a living. In 1707, moreover, the Common Council told the churchwardens to “put a Badge upon the Clths of such persons as are clothed by this city with the Mark N:Y in blew or Red Cloathh.” (Only ten years earlier Parliament had passed a similar law requiring pensioned paupers to wear the letter P.)
During Queen Anne’s War, warnings about the inadequacy of the poor rate became a standard feature of the annual churchwardens’ report. In 1713 the wardens said their resources had been exhausted by the many people in the city “who are in great want and a miserable condition and must inevitably perish unless some speedy method be taken for their support.” Next year the tax was raised to £438, three times the amount collected in 1697.
Relatively few New Yorkers received municipal assistance (one reason being that local congregations continued to give food, clothing, shelter, pensions, and medical care to their “own” poor, who therefore weren’t counted as public charges). Between 1721 and 1725 the names of only two-hundred-odd residents appear on the relief rolls—ninety-nine women, fifty-five men, fifty children—170 of them on outrelief, twenty in the almshouse, and fourteen as boarders. Nearly all the boarders and residents of the almshouse were men too old or sick to work; the bulk of those on outrelief, by contrast, were indigent widows with children.