Liberty's Prisoners. Jen Manion
small security in a city teeming with formerly enslaved and immigrant newcomers desperate for work and housing. But even this came at a price. Working women were generally denied the freedoms enjoyed by their male counterparts. If male laborers were viewed as “a footloose and potentially rebellious element in society,” the women who worked predominantly as hired or bound house servants were greatly restricted by the watchful eye of their employers, with whom they probably lived.4 Watchful or needy masters and mistresses scrutinized their comings and goings, demanded their constant availability, and subjected them to untold abuses.
The revolutionary promises of liberty and the opportunity to pursue happiness were not materializing for this group of servants and free laborers, leading many to seize them for themselves.5 Enslaved African Americans along with indentured servants and domestic workers of African, Irish, and English descent clamored for a taste of freedom from tyranny and suffering in their daily lives. They challenged the abuse and authority of masters, mistresses, and employers. They came together to share frustrations, aspirations, and plots. They ran away, disobeyed orders, threatened masters, and stole from the homes of their employers.6 Most significantly, they denied their labor to those who felt entitled to it, by custom and by law. Seeking their own piece of the revolution’s promise, this group upset the economic and social hierarchy. A majority of elite and middling Philadelphian households were dependent on the labor of this group and indulged in theatrical hyperbole when articulating their fears of and frustrations with such bold demonstrations of resistance. As a last resort, they turned to the state for help and had their servants or slaves imprisoned to punish them and regain control. The jail was freely used throughout the colonial era by slaveholders and masters of servants to punish them for not working hard enough, disobeying, or running away.7 The penitentiary would serve this same function in the post-Revolutionary period—but in a vastly expanded way.
The refusal of those enslaved or bound to work combined with the inability of others to find adequate employment put labor at the heart of social disorder in the decades following the war. Hard labor became the hallmark of a new system enacted through a series of laws passed between 1786 and 1794 that reduced the number of capital crimes, outlawed corporal punishment, and introduced imprisonment as the premier punishment. By reinstituting bound labor through punishment, elites aimed to discipline this recalcitrant workforce, exhort money for the state from their labor, and instill republican family values on the working poor. A strict sexual division of labor was imposed, requiring male convicts to clean the public streets while women worked behind closed doors. This was the first of many efforts to organize and segregate prisoners along lines of difference. Certain kinds of work were already more commonly associated with either men or women, but institutional labor regimes would exacerbate—even naturalize—these distinctions. Though the work of women in the eighteenth-century city was very diverse and often public, institutional labor regimes were narrow in scope and increasingly hidden. Prison labor not only foreshadowed but also accelerated the diminishing scope and value of women’s work more broadly by the mid-nineteenth century at the same time that more white women and free blacks were becoming household heads in Philadelphia, from 1790 to 1830.8
If labor served as a dead end for women, it offered the realization of the full potential of punishment exacted against men. The opportunity for structured, institutionalized labor might literally help transform convicts into workers.9 For men of all racial and ethnic groups, the prison initially offered the chance for reform. The opportunity to work in a manufactory was a path to redemption and even citizenship for men who embraced it. But for men who knew slavery, indentured servitude, impressment, and other systems of exploited labor, being forced to work without pay was not the olive branch it was touted to be.10 The penitentiary promised humane treatment, opportunity for quiet reflection, and religious counsel, in part to avoid comparisons to slavery.11 While moral reformation served as the ideological basis for the penitentiary, labor provided its economic justification. But the nature of work also produced its own ideologies, including the fortification of a heterosexual political economy that ensured women’s political and economic dependence on men, even though so many men proved unable or unwilling to be depended upon.
Public Punishment
A new era in punishment began when men dressed in blue and brown striped uniforms of coarse fabric and woolen caps took to the city streets with shovels, brooms, and wheelbarrows to make up for their crimes. Men who previously may have been pushed around the city from public square to public square in a cage, subject to whips, stones, and a good old public shaming were now expected to contribute to the greater good. When elite Philadelphian Ann Warder went out for a walk one spring day in 1787, she confronted a group of men cleaning the streets, harassing strangers, and begging for money. Warder wrote, “They have an iron collar around their neck and waist to which a long chain is fastened and at the end a heavy ball. As they proceed with their work this is taken up and thrown before them.”12 Warder complained about the situation and suggested that the guards needed to be more effective in preventing people from speaking to the prisoners—and giving them money.13 This scenario captures one of the many paradoxes of penal reform: public labor was instituted as punishment for lawlessness—and further contributed to public disorder and the discomfort of the city’s elite denizens in the process.
American reforms followed British policies in many ways, including public punishment. Even before debates over public punishment in Pennsylvania flooded the papers, evidence from the British experiment with the practice was printed in the Pennsylvania Gazette. The late Dr. Fothergill had argued that if the purpose of public punishment was to deter as much as to punish, the condemned should be paraded in front of those most likely to offend.14 He added, “I do not mean, however, that they should go at large, though in chains and with keepers. They should be kept as much as possible from all converse with the public, and yet be seen by them.” Fothergill identified the challenge of encouraging visibility while denying communication. Public punishment in Pennsylvania differed from its British counterpart in that it paraded convicts through the middle of crowded city streets rather than restricting them to labor on the wharves, away from public view.
Public labor was authorized by the 1786 Act to Amend the Penal Laws of the State, the first major penal reform bill passed after independence. The popular bill was devised under the rule of Pennsylvania’s radical constitution of 1776 and passed into law a decade later by the liberal Constitutionalists then in power, signaling widespread support for the bill’s contents. This issue proved more unifying and less controversial than many other topics of the day.15 The new law required public punishment of all convicts at “continued hard labor … in streets of cities and towns, and upon the highways of the open country and other public works.”16 The act officially served three major functions: to offset the expense of caring for convicts in prison; to discourage criminals through shame and embarrassment from resuming a life of crime; and to deter others from resorting to crime. While much was made of the power of shame and deterrence, it was the financial piece that made the bill popular. The idea that the prisoners would earn money to provide restitution, cover court fees, and pay for their own upkeep was popular among judges who relied on fees for payment, elites wary of footing the tax bill for public institutions, and a general public suspicious of an expansive and strong government.
While elite men agreed on the bill’s contents, workers and city officials were another matter as men jostled for power and authority under the new government. The city’s street commissioners refused to follow the law and use prisoners as workers, claiming that to do so would interfere with those men already employed at cleaning the streets. Such conflicts between elites and workers were increasingly common as white men—except for the working poor—embraced their newfound political power and elites struggled to assert their authority in less autocratic ways.17 Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania Thomas McKean eventually forced the commissioners to hire convicts. Funds were transferred from the city to the county budget at a rate of one shilling nine pence per day as wages.18 This rate was considerably lower than the going rate for workingmen engaging in other jobs throughout the city, such as cooking or cleaning.19 The financial arrangement seemed ideal for all parties except the prisoners themselves, who would scarcely see much of their earnings.