Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [305]
“THE SLOW PROCESS OF EDUCATION & RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION”
Although committed to charitable works, New York’s philanthropic pioneers did not trust charity alone to bring lasting improvements in the lives of the urban poor. Their assumption—increasingly common among the mercantile and professional classes, successful artisan-entrepreneurs, and well-off mechanics alike—was that poverty stemmed from moral turpitude, not merely, or even mainly, from misfortune. With the breakdown of traditional relations of production, households and workshops could no longer be relied upon to teach the habits of self-discipline and self-reliance necessary for survival in a wage-labor economy. Prudence, decency, sobriety, thrift, punctuality—these and similar virtues would now, more than ever, have to be instilled through what Pintard described as “the slow process of education & religious instruction.”
Ample precedents already existed, in fact, for using schools to provide poor children with the kind of guidance once supplied by households and workshops. By the mid-1790s there were half a dozen so-called “charity schools” in town, plus a dozenodd “pay schools” run by free-lance masters. Together, they enrolled better than half the children in the city between the ages of five and fifteen—girls as well as boys, blacks as well as whites, representing a broad cross-section of social classes. Additional charity schools sprang up around the turn of the century, including one organized by Isabella Graham’s Society for the Relief of Poor Widows. The Female Association, founded in 1798, opened a school to teach poor girls the “principles of piety and virtue.”
In 1806 Mrs. Graham and her daughter, Joanna Bethune (wife of wealthy reformer Divie Bethune), conceived the idea of founding an orphanage where working-class children could be brought up to lead productive lives. Orphanages were unknown in the United States—New Amsterdam’s short-lived orphan asylum was now a dim memory at best—but they had been strongly endorsed by European reformers. When Graham and Bethune unveiled their idea before a meeting of prominent ladies at the City Hotel (one of those in attendance was Elizabeth Hamilton, Alexander’s widow), it won enthusiastic approval and led at once to the formation of the Orphan Asylum Society. In 1807 the cornerstone of its first home was laid at the corner of Barrow and Asylum (now 4th) streets in Greenwich. (Nearby Bethune Street commemorates Joanna Bethune’s long career as a philanthropist and educator.)
It seemed doubtful, though, that these scattered, uncoordinated initiatives could bring about major improvements in the manners and morals of the poor. Thomas Eddy, the wealthy Quaker who served as almshouse commissioner and warden of Newgate, raised this problem in his correspondence with Patrick Colquhoun, a London police magistrate active in the famed British Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor. In 1803 Colquhoun warned Eddy that if American schools weren’t soon put on more solid foundations, the country’s rapidly expanding population would cause a crisis “manifested by extreme ignorance and immoral conduct, as it respects a considerable proportion of the lower classes of society.”
That was enough for Eddy. With the help of Pintard, Golden, Mitchill, Clinton, and other influential friends— and with financial assistance from the Masons—he set about organizing the New York Free School Society (1805). Its purpose, in Pintard’s phrase, was to eradicate crime and pauperism in the city by inculcating “habits of cleanliness, subordination, and order” in the children of the lower classes.
To that end, its first school, which opened the following