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Religion too became a rallying ground and point of contention. On July 12, 1824, the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, Irish Presbyterian laborers took up fife, drum, and Orange flag and commenced a celebratory parade through Greenwich Village. Awaiting them were a grim assembly of Irish Catholics, mostly weavers, who demanded the Orangemen lower their colors. Someone threw a punch, out came clubs and brickbats, and a furious donnybrook got underway. After countless rioters had fallen, the watch arrived and arrested thirty-three participants, all Catholics.

At the ensuing trial, Emmet and Sampson got their compatriots off by recounting to the judge, Recorder Richard Riker, the long history of Irish mistreatment. Riker responded evenhandedly, chastising the Orangemen for introducing to the United States the “dangerous and unbecoming practices, which had caused so much disorder and misery in their own [country],” and blaming the Catholics for letting themselves be provoked. He then lauded all the combatants as valuable accessions to the nation and urged them to set aside ancient quarrels and forge amicable relationships in their adopted homeland.

Like the Callithumpian bands, bumptious volunteers and fractious gangs, as emblems of disorder, would draw increasing attention from civic authorities concerned over what appeared to be growing numbers of masterless men.

30

Reforms and Revivals

In the spring of 1817 a New York charitable agency announced, with mingled pride and dismay, that during the previous winter “fifteen thousand, men, women, and children, equal to one-seventh of the whole population of our city, have been supported by public or private bounty and munificence!” Already the alarming size of this dependent population had prompted New Yorkers active in benevolent work to begin reemphasizing the centuries-old distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor—or, as such leading British political economists as Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and Jeremy Bentham were now putting it, between poverty and pauperism.

These were held to be very different conditions, meriting very different responses. Poverty was providential. The sick and crippled, the old and orphaned, the widowed and deserted, the victims of epidemics and casualties of war were poor through no fault of their own, and their plight warranted at least a minimalist benevolence. Pauperism, however, stemmed from laziness, fraud, and assorted moral degeneracies, and it called for chastisement and correction, not charity.

Thomas Eddy, one of New York’s most influential reformers and sometime warden of Newgate Prison, agreed. As he explained to De Witt Clinton, he had grown “tired assisting them in their distress, and it appears to me more wise, to fix on every profitable plan to prevent their poverty and misery.” His decades-long correspondence with Patrick Colquhoun had kept him well informed about the work of the London Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, and he had decided that the time was ripe for a similar body in New York. In December 1817, together with master organizer John Pintard and the Quaker chemist John Griscom, Eddy called a meeting out of which emerged the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism (SPP).

The SPP membership was top-heavy with prominent merchants, lawyers, and clergy, representing a cross-section of political and denominational loyalties, Yankees as well as Knickerbockers. These were essentially the same men who for the past two or three decades had led the Humane Society, the Free School Society, New York Hospital, the New-York Historical Society, the Literary and Philosophical Society, and other cultural and benevolent organizations in the city. Many were also deeply involved in promoting the Erie Canal.

They now threw their collective weight behind the view that pauperism stemmed from ignorance, idleness, intemperance, extravagance, imprudent marriages, and deficient childrearing practices—what Griscom called the lack of