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The relief committees were quickly overwhelmed by the numbers of the needy. Twenty-five hundred requested and received aid in the Seventh Ward (roughly one in every ten residents). In the Fifth, six thousand were assisted, approximately a third of the ward’s population. Soon hundreds were being turned away each day. Provisions dwindled at local soup kitchens. In mid-February, the Fifth Ward’s money gave out. Almsgiving stopped. People starved, froze, or contracted fatal diseases through exposure and privation. The ad hoc, civic-minded approach was discredited. In the subsequent hard winters of 1839-42, ward committees were not revived.

Some of the relief burden was picked up by the churches, especially evangelical Presbyterians. Even during good times, American Tract Society visitors, horrified by slum conditions, had begun to offer “temporal goods” along with tracts and prayers. Acting as individuals, they had paid the rent for families about to be evicted, brought clothing and food to the hungry and ill clad, and sought jobs for those without work. When hard times struck, tractarians continued and expanded these efforts. But the dimensions of the crisis engendered a growing sense of helplessness and a hardening of old convictions that most of the poor had only themselves to blame for their misery.

In February 1838 the evangelical ladies of the New York Female Moral Reform Society, having discovered the great and growing destitution among the laboring classes, began distributing charity to those deemed virtuous and receptive to the word of God. But most of the poor proved neither, in their judgment, being either intemperate or Catholic. As one visitor to Ann Street put it that year: “Alas! few were found deserving of relief, [as] nearly all were reduced to their present suffering by a course of vice.” Their mid-1830s optimism about the perfectibility of man gave way to renewed pessimism about the intractability of poverty, a gloom deepened further by the bankruptcy of many of their staunchest supporters. The Protestant Episcopal City Mission Society also found donations hard to come by. Saddled with debt for churches built and clerics hired in the halcyon thirties, it soldiered on through the depression years—growing more and more convinced that the poor were an alien and inferior class, mostly incapable of salvation—and by 1843 it was facing bankruptcy.

In July of that year the New York City Tract Society, also buckling under its charitable burdens, decided to spin off almsgiving to a separate organization. After investigating contemporary European approaches to poverty, it established, at the end of 1844, an Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (AICP). The new organization proposed a centralized and scientific approach to managing the city’s now seemingly permanent underclass of indigents. (A Brooklyn AICP was established the same year, with Seth Low as president and a plan of operation identical to Manhattan’s.)

The directors, who included some of the richest bankers, merchants, and industrialists in New York, were only too aware of the devastation wrought by the depression. They insisted nevertheless that poverty was caused not by failures of the economic system over which they presided but by deficiencies of the poor themselves, in essence reviving the analysis and strategy adopted nearly three decades earlier by the Society for the Prevention of Poverty (a continuity underscored by the prominence in the AICP of Dr. John H. Griscom, son of SPP founder John Griscom).

To direct the new association’s work the managers chose Robert Milham Hartley as executive secretary. The English-born Hartley, a devout Presbyterian, had served from 1833 to 1842 as secretary of the New-York City Temperance Society; like most of the directors, he believed poverty bespoke depravity. As “pauperism” was the problem, Hartley wrote, and “the chief cause of its increase among us is the injudicious dispensation of relief,” the AICP’s “primary” goal would be “to discountenance