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By Root 8262 0

the FBS had opened the House of Reception, a refuge for prostitutes in Yorkville, four miles north of City Hall. Its bell-driven daily routine included scripture readings and sewing classes to train the magdalens for future jobs with Christian families. The FBS severely limited the appeal of their refuge, however, by refusing to accept any but “worthy” candidates, which required turning away “bigoted Papists” and impious Protestants. After two years they had gathered in only 145 penitents, and of these only four seemed “serious and industrious.” Worse, in the summer of 1836 inmates seized control of the institution, and the bitterly discouraged managers dismissed their charges, closed the building, and turned to dispensing tracts about the Seventh Commandment.

Prostitution Exposed, by “A Butt Ender.” A droll parody of the anti-prostitution campaign organized by McDowall and other reformers, the book conveniently supplies the names and addresses for more than a hundred local courtesans and brothels. (General Research Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

In May 1834, however, some of the FBS’s more militant members had split off to form a new citywide group, the New York Female Moral Reform Society (FMRS). This body quickly won powerful evangelical backing, with Lydia Andrews Finney, the revivalist’s wife, becoming its first directress and Arthur Tappan stepping in as its financial backer. The FMRS now appointed McDowall as missionary-general to New York’s prostitutes, and he began leading teams of men and women on “active visits” to brothels. Arriving early on Sunday morning, just as the ladies of the night and their customers were waking up, the reformers stationed themselves across the street, knelt in prayer, and began reading Bible passages and singing hymns. When they tried this at some of the rougher venues in the Points and the Hook, the crusaders were often met with curses and threats. At the westside parlor houses, however, they seemed to have something of a deterrent effect: closed coaches would circle for an hour or so, then clatter off. Encouraged, McDowall and company upped the ante by noting down names of the more determined patrons and printing them in McDowall’s Journal, alongside editorials excoriating brothels as “stagnant pools of moral filth” whose owners “ought to be executed.”

McDowall also lit into New York’s pornography trade. Charging that “obscene prints and licentious figures and paintings” were sold widely in the city, he collected a variety of “obscene books, prints, music-boxes, [and] snuff-boxes,” which he displayed at a meeting of three hundred clergymen hi May 1834. Out of probity or prurience, McDowall’s Journal did well. Circulation that year topped fourteen thousand a month, with half the issues handed out around town, the other half dispatched to rural subscribers.

Another grand jury, impaneled in 1834 to investigate McDowall’s Journal, declared it patently “offensive to taste, injurious to morals, and degrading to the character of [the] city.” Even the Third Presbytery, the body that licensed McDowall to preach and supported his campaign, advised him to discontinue the journal. Accordingly he offered his press to the FMRS, which purchased it, renamed it the Advocate of Moral Reform, and staffed it exclusively with women—editors, typesetters, even financial managers. The Advocate gathered 16,500 subscribers within three years, becoming one of the nation’s most widely read evangelical papers.

Under the women’s direction, the Advocate went beyond unmasking men who visited brothels to asking prostitutes who had “ruined” them—it being an article of faith with the ladies that many women “on the town” had been victimized by licentious males—and publishing the names of men whom its investigations showed to be guilty. It sued seducers for civil damages on occasion and launched a petition campaign to lobby public officials in Albany to make seduction a criminal offense.

The newspaper seethed with visceral antagonism to salacious males, and in its