Poverty and Poor Relief in Pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia

Abstract

R ECENT studies have given clear indications that poverty had become a major problem in eighteenth-century America, especially in the urban centers.' But lost in generalized notions of increasing stratification, growing propertylessness, and swollen poor relief rolls is a particular understanding of when and why poverty became the lot of a large number of city dwellers, who and how numerous the poor were, and how ideology and conditions interacted in the responses of public officials and city leaders to this blotch on the promise of American life. Because extensive records of private and public agencies that dealt with poor relief have survived for eighteenth-century Philadelphia, it is possible to provide some tentative answers to these questions for at least one colonial city and, in the process, to uncover new data about changing conditions in that city before the Revolution. Philadelphia might seem an unlikely place to study poverty in colonial America because the city has been viewed so often, both by eighteenthcentury commentators and by modern historians, as representative of the nearly unlimited possibilities for ascent. The legend of Benjamin Franklin on his way to wealth has clouded historical vision for a long time. Moreover, it is widely believed that Quaker humanitarianism, upper-class benevolence, and progress were the distinguishing characteristics of Philadelphia life. This view has been most compellingly presented by Carl and Jessica Bridenbaugh, whose study of the social uses of the favors of providence in Philadelphia portrays an elite who believed intensely in the Enlightenment view of the perfectibility of mankind. Regarding the indignities of poverty, illness, injustice and misfortune as affronts to