Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [400]
Sunday schools reacted to the new climate by cutting back on the three R’s and giving more emphasis to formal religious instruction, the effect of which was to discourage enrollment outside their own congregations—most notably by African-American adults. Although the Manumission Society expanded the number of African Free Schools from two to seven, the Public School Society absorbed them all in 1834. Renamed Colored Free Schools, they experienced a precipitous decline in quality that soon drove away many students.
JUVENILE DELINQUENTS
With only half of the city’s children in school and the old apprenticeship system in disarray, it was almost inevitable that thousands of ragamuffins would become a fixture of the city scene—lolling along the wharves, begging on the streets, thronging the shipyards, hanging about Brooklyn ropewalks on the Sabbath, playing cards and spouting profanity. Some edged into criminality. Groups of girls stole sugar, coffee, or tea from the docks and sold them to market women. Boys pilfered brass rods, rope, or sheets of copper and sold them to junk dealers. Marauding bands robbed grocery stores and vandalized houses. Boys became accomplished pickpockets. Girls as young as twelve drifted in and out of prostitution.
The conventional response to errant or merely “vagrant” children was to put them in jail, but chaplain John Stanford began to argue as early as 1815 that incarcerating youthful offenders with adult criminals merely trained a new generation of professional outlaws. Stanford thought that these children should be placed in an “Asylum for Vagrant Youth” where they could be instructed in moral and religious principles and apprenticed to a trade. Stanford’s idea languished until the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism fastened on the notion that wayward youths formed the true “core of pauperism.” In the fall of 1819, just back from one of his visits with British reformers, John Griscom spoke to a packed City Hotel meeting about the work with delinquent children currently underway in London. Over the next several years the SPP became so enthusiastic about the youth-oriented solution to poverty that in 1823 it reconstituted itself as the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents. Convinced that they could smother pauperism in its cradle, the society’s spokesmen lobbied city and state officials to incorporate and fund the country’s first juvenile reformatory.
The New York House of Refuge opened on January 1, 1825, in an abandoned federal arsenal on the Bloomingdale Road between 22nd and 23rd streets, amid farms and orchards on the outskirts of town. The Refuge’s charges were children under sixteen, committed by the courts for indefinite terms (not to exceed the age of twenty-one for boys or eighteen for girls). Their “indolent and worthless” parents, in the Rev. Stanford’s phrase, had allowed them to roam the streets, frequenting theaters and taverns until ensnared by alcohol, immorality, and crime. Stanford didn’t believe that they were beyond redemption, on the other hand, for as the directors of the Refuge put it, it was necessary only to put them through “a vigorous course of moral and corporal discipline” to make them “able and obedient.”
Upon entering the Refuge, accordingly, the children were stripped and washed and given uniforms, their hair was cut to a standard length, and they were placed in windowless five-by-eight-foot cells. Day after day they followed the same lockstep routine, parsed by bells. Bells rang at sunrise and fifteen minutes later, when guards unlocked their cells. Bells herded them to the washroom, to the chapel, to school, and to breakfast by 7:00 A.M. They worked from 7:30 till noon (boys making brass nails or cane seats; girls washing, cooking, or mending clothes), when bells called them