Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [303]
During the 1790s and 1800s, Clinton and other well-to-do New Yorkers would create a battery of humanitarian and educational associations to improve the lot of their fellow citizens. In time, their membership rolls comprised a who’s who of the city’s most successful and influential citizens—merchants, lawyers, bankers, brokers, physicians, clergymen, Columbia College faculty—many of whose names turn up over and over again in an astonishing variety of causes.
As a rule, these associations were solidly Protestant and determinedly bipartisan. (The Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts, and Manufactures, for example, was founded in the early nineties by George Clinton, John Jay, Philip Van Cortlandt, Edward Livingston, and James Duane, among others, a judicious balancing of political tendencies and temperaments that would be duplicated often in years to come.) Nominally private, they often received generous support from both municipal and state governments—as well they might considering the roster of governors, mayors, legislators, assemblymen, and other public officials who were their founders and managers. They were guided by an awakening sense of civic pride, by compassion, and by an absolute certainty that the best people ought to toil, directly and personally, for the public good—as they denned it. “What a field our large city presents for active exertions & useful improvements!” exulted John Pintard.
No one was more active than Pintard himself. After leaving the office of city inspector in 1809, he became secretary of the Mutual Insurance Company, his sole source of income for the next twenty years (during most of which time he and his family lived frugally in rooms above the company’s Wall Street office). It was abundantly clear by then, however, that his real work lay in benevolence and philanthropy. In all, over the course of thirty-odd years, he would be the prime mover in dozens of similar organizations.
Never far from Pintard’s mind was the knowledge that men such as himself were all too scarce in New York. The city’s wealthiest residents were on the whole unable or unwilling “to attend to the multiplied demands on humanity & benevolence,” he once told his daughter. “Here, these duties fall oppressively heavy on a few public spirited citizens.” But in the end virtue was its own reward. “The further I go down the hall of life,” he added modestly on another occasion, “the more I rejoice in the retrospect of being a coadjutor in some of our great benevolent and charitable institutions and that when I depart—it will cheer me that I am leaving the world better than I found it.”
When genteel reformers like Pintard talked about leaving the world a better place, they meant, above all, ameliorating the misery of their city’s lower classes. Pintard himself admitted that this mass of humanity—immigrants, working poor, the aged and infirm, blacks, widows, orphans—seemed hardly worth the trouble. They were, he said censoriously, “improvident, careless, and filthy.” Yet if Pintard and his colleagues believed anything, they believed in what De Witt Clinton had called “the progressive improvement of human affairs.” Shown the way, they thought, even the meanest people (the bulk of them, anyway) could become decent, productive citizens. This wasn’t simply altruism. A permanent class of paupers, unincorporated into legitimate political and social institutions, posed a threat to the republic.
In this spirit, the Society for the Relief of Distressed Debtors set out in 1787 to provide short-term assistance to some of the city’s neediest residents. Its managers—almost exclusively business and professional men—would include, at one time or another, such luminaries as Clinton, Pintard, Eddy, Dr. Hosack, and Divie Bethune, a wealthy Scottish merchant. At first, the society’s aim was to provide occupants