Hard Times, Property Crimes, and the Perils of Making Shift: The Working Poor in Jacksonian-Era Cumberland County, Pennsylvania

Abstract

Hard Times, Property Crimes, and the Perils of Making Shift:The Working Poor in Jacksonian-Era Cumberland County, Pennsylvania Michael B. McCoy (bio) Abstract This essay draws on an uninterrupted stretch of indictment records from 1827 to 1846 to consider the relationship between hard times and property crimes in rural Pennsylvania. Focusing on working poor defendants, the piece illustrates how struggling men and women used petty crime as a makeshift response to material hardship and how such a strategy often led to more hard times. By examining the ways in which economic conditions and crime together shaped the lives of laboring people in a rural setting, this essay adds to the rich historiographies of working-class experience and crime in Pennsylvania. Demonstrating that rural crime was born of the same struggle for survival as it was in the Jacksonian city, the essay ultimately suggests that, amid capitalist transformation, the material lives of urban and rural working people—if they were ever that different—grew increasingly uniform. Property Crime, The Working Poor, Jacksonian Economy, Rural Poverty, Makeshift Strategies James gutshall was no stranger to hard times. The Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, "laboring man" was perennially poor, owned little in the way of personal property, was consistently absent from the tax rolls, and struggled to support his "wife and large family." In January 1833, with his prospects few and his problems many, Gutshall crafted a crude $7 promissory note and went shopping at John Ross's Dickinson Township store. Riddled though it was with errors, the note was evidently passable enough to allow him to walk out of Ross's store with eight yards of fabric, three handkerchiefs, one bandana, three pounds of coffee, three rolls of tobacco, and a two-dollar credit toward future purchases. Realizing his mistake, Ross quickly sought the assistance of John Auld, a [End Page 55] justice of the peace. Auld ordered the sheriff to undertake a "diligent search in the day time" of Gutshall's home, secure any or all of the goods in question, and bring Gutshall before the justice "to be examined . . . and further to be dealt with according to the law." The next day, Gutshall was arrested and confined to the county jail. More than two months would pass before he would face trial. Appearing before the quarter sessions in April, Gutshall was swiftly indicted, convicted, and sentenced to three months' confinement, saddled with a $21 fine, and ordered to pay court costs. Already grim, Gutshall's financial situation deteriorated in the months following his conviction. From his jail cell in June 1833, he petitioned the court of common pleas for relief from mounting debts and legal fees. Time lost to imprisonment left him and his family with mounting debts to local storekeepers. Unable to work, he could not pay his court-imposed fine, let alone the ever-increasing jailers' fees. Freed sometime after his August 12, 1833, insolvency hearing, Gutshall turned his attention to recovering from the economic consequences of conviction. Lost time, lost wages, and a damaged reputation would, however, haunt him for years to come; in 1837, he would again seek the aid of the insolvency court.1 Confronted by the uncertainties and material hardships that attended the Jacksonian economy, Gutshall had few options for patching the holes in his family's budget—all of them temporary, and none of them very good.2 For Gutshall, and poor men and women like him, making ends [End Page 56] meet in the face of poverty and an uncertain market for their labor often meant making shift: relying upon a handful of short-term strategies, both licit and otherwise, including the poorhouse, outdoor relief, charitable assistance, buying on credit, and petty crime.3 Faced with the struggle for subsistence, Gutshall turned to property crime, a decision that led not to relief but instead to deeper financial hardship. Gutshall's experiences as a working man and a defendant offer insight into the convergence of economic insecurity and crime in the lives of rural working people.4 Indeed, his story, and the stories of those like him, illustrate how the working poor used crime as a makeshift response to material hardship and the...