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By Root 7859 0

year in rented quarters in the Fourth Ward, adopted the Lancasterian system of instruction. Devised by the English Quaker Joseph Lancaster, this involved the selection of older and better pupils as “monitors,” or assistant teachers, who were trained to drill information and biblical precepts into their younger charges. The system was cheap and efficient. To speed the morning roll call, pupils were each assigned a number that was posted on the wall against which they lined up, allowing monitors to see at once who was absent. Learning meant rote memorization, imagination was actively discouraged, and while Lancaster prohibited corporal punishment, pupils in need of additional motivation could be shackled to their desks or made to carry six-pound logs on their shoulders.

Pintard had said that the eradication of poverty required religious instruction as well as education, and here too he and other Manhattan reformers took their cues from abroad. William Wilberforce’s Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Pro-fessed Christians (1797), widely reprinted in the United States, urged the responsible classes to spread Christian virtue among their social inferiors via bipartisan, nonsectarian organizations like his own Society for the Suppression of Vice. During the later 1790s and early 1800s, in accordance with this and similar recommendations, New York clergymen and lay leaders assembled an arsenal of specialized associations for moral uplift and humanitarian reform.

In 1794 John Stanford, an English Baptist who had migrated to the city in 1789, helped establish the New York Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and Piety Among the Poor. Stanford had no regular pulpit in Manhattan, but he conducted a private school, instructed theological students, wrote and distributed religious tracts, and preached frequently around the city. Now his New York Society took up the task of distributing Bibles and religious pamphlets to the poor.

In 1796 the Dutch Reformed and Baptist churches jointly established the New York Missionary Society, which initially targeted Long Island Indians and published the Theological Magazine (1796-99). There was no mistaking the aims of the Society for Aiding and Assisting the Magistrates in the Suppression of Vice and Immorality on the Lord’s Day (1795), of the Society for the Suppression of Vice (1802), of the Society for the Suppression of Vice and Immorality (1810), or of such periodicals as the short-lived New-York Missionary Magazine and Repository (1800-1801), which ran articles demonstrating the divinity of Jesus, the coherence of the Bible, and the like. Hamilton’s Christian Constitutional Society (1802)—an attempt to tap this impulse on behalf of the Federalist party—went nowhere, as direct political intervention breached the separation of church and state, already a sacrosanct element of American republican thought.

Another British import, the Sunday school, reached New York in 1792, when Isabella Graham founded an evening Sunday school for adults, black as well as white, on Mulberry Street. The following year a former slave named Catherine Ferguson opened a Sunday school for both children and adults: Katy Ferguson’s School for the Poor in New York City. After 1800 the Sunday school movement in New York accelerated dramatically. In 1803 Graham, her daughter Joanna Bethune, and her son-in-law Divie Bethune—the Bethunes too were in regular contact with British reformers and followed closely the work of the London Sunday School Society—started a new Sunday school on Mott Street. Using the Bible as a textbook, the school offered reading and writing classes along with religious instruction. A decade later there were fifty Sunday schools in New York with a combined enrollment of six thousand.

As the campaign for popular religious instruction gained momentum, evangelical Protestant clergymen began to preach among the poor (more and more of them immigrant Catholics) confined in municipal institutions. The Rev. John Stanford became the semiofficial chaplain to the almshouse in 1807. He