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By Root 8312 0

of society: sobriety, cleanliness, industriousness, frugality, punctuality, good manners, and the like. European precedents suggested a host of tactics, among them savings banks, workhouses, Sunday schools, and a ban on street begging, all of which the SPP advocated. Another possibility, currently underway in Glasgow and Hamburg, was the “moral superintendence of neighborhoods.” The idea was to divide the city into districts, each of which would be assigned to two or three well-bred visitors who could advise the poor on such matters as domestic management, childrearing, and proper conduct. For several years SPP “visitors” fanned out through the city, diligently compiling information on the background and character of every resident. By 1821, though, the project had foundered. Only one district had a visitation system fully in place, and that was a fashionable neighborhood where 90 percent of the householders were found to be of “good” character and there wasn’t a pauper in sight.

URBAN MISSIONARIES

Evangelicals in the city had meanwhile discerned a connection between pauperism and religious absenteeism. It was no secret that many poor New Yorkers were still unchurched—according to the SPP itself, some fifteen thousand of the city’s twentyfive thousand families rarely if ever took part in worship services—at least in part because poor neighborhoods had too few churches and their residents weren’t often welcomed by congregations in well-to-do parts of town. Until it became linked with the genteel revolt against charity, however, urban irreligion had aroused only fitful interest among mainstream Christian denominations. The New-York Missionary Society, founded back in 1796, targeted Indians and settlers on the frontier. The Society for Supporting the Gospel Among the Poor of the City of New-York had been formed back in 1812, but its primary concern remained the underwriting of John Stanford’s preaching to hospital, prison, and almshouse inmates.

All this changed after 1815, when a new generation of evangelicals began work “among the destitute of our own city.” In 1818 the Female Missionary Society for the Poor of the City of New-York established a free church in African-American Bancker Street—the very “seat of Satan.” The following year they planted another chapel on Allen Street, near Corlear’s Hook. The ladies retained ministers to garrison these outposts but also took the field themselves, visiting the poor, praying with them in their homes, and coaxing destitute mothers to church. Clerics found such female initiatives alarming, and in 1821 the Rev. William Gray told the women that because they “had engaged in an enterprise beyond your appropriate sphere,” active management had “been wholly transferred from the hands of the Ladies into those of the Gentlemen.” Ministers applauded when the Presbyterian Young Men’s Missionary Society of New York built a church near Corlear’s Hook and staffed it with eager young preachers, and when the Presbyterian New-York Evangelical Missionary Society of Young Men set up mission stations in the Hook and on Bancker Street, where they conducted services, visited families, and held prayer meetings.

Like the SPP, evangelicals believed in “moral superintendence.” The Rev. Ward Stafford, Female Missionary Society preacher-at-large, argued in his New Missionary Field (1817) that “the very sight of the moral and pious is a check to the wicked.” Because New York wasn’t a “well-regulated village,” where the “character, and circumstances of every family are almost necessarily known,” it was imperative for godly men and women to make their presence felt, dispensing not charity but their own righteousness. Stafford also accepted the reigning orthodoxy: “If people believe, that they shall be relieved when in distress,” he asserted, “they will not generally make exertions, will not labour when they are able and have the opportunity.” But “let it be known that death or extreme suffering will be the consequence of idleness, or profligacy, and the number of the idle and the profligate will soon be diminished.