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CHAPTER 1

Rebellious Workers

EARLY AMERICAN CULTURE was rife with contradictions. The War for Independence upset long-standing social hierarchies among white men while leaving white women, African Americans, and laboring people with little to show for their efforts. Victory ensured that the economic interests of Anglo-American merchants would no longer be thwarted by the political or economic whims of the British, making the war little more than a lateral move. When British aristocrats and elites went packing, wealthy and learned Anglo-American men took their places as heads of state, industry, and society. The working poor, indentured, enslaved, and even middling men and women whose efforts proved vital to the war’s success expected something more: a leveling of old social and political hierarchies, greater economic opportunities, and freedom from bondage. But only a few conditions changed. The passage of the 1780 Gradual Abolition Act made Pennsylvania the first state to legislate against slavery while preserving the institution for another generation, as the Act famously did not free a single enslaved person. Non-land owning white men were granted voting rights, Northern states increasingly abolished slavery, and middling and elite women had more opportunities for formal education. As doors opened for the middling sorts, others belonging to the “lower sorts,” including vagrants, the poor, unskilled workers, the enslaved, bound servants, immigrants, free blacks, and servants, remained shut out. Poverty and its attendant life circumstances (homelessness, unemployment, living on streets, illness, begging, relying on religious or public charity) would threaten the American experiment more than the British military ever could. Those suffering greatly under the volatile economy of the early republic were targeted as the source of a social problem rather than result of an economic one. Elites believed that a faulty, outdated penal law contributed to chaos and lawlessness, inspiring a dedicated effort to transform official responses to the rebellions, crime, and poverty of the masses.

In Philadelphia, as in many other seaport cities, the compact design of neighborhoods put rich and poor in close proximity to each other. The density of Philadelphia and New York in 1800 was unparalleled in North America, with a population of 40,000 people per square mile compared to the national average of six.¹ The two cities were becoming more like London—a city with 129,000 residents in just over one square mile in 1801—and less like anywhere else in the United States.² Cities also had distinctly different demographic trends from their rural counterparts, including more free blacks, female heads of household, and young white men.³ The widespread reliance on enslaved, bound, or hired domestic help brought the laboring poor into the homes of middling and elite Philadelphians alike. Domestic workers who were enslaved or bound were treated as dependents and received housing and food as part of their arrangement—no 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. The city benefited from cheap labor while the county was earning income to offset the costs of imprisonment. Officials hoped that by sparing the public the financial burden of supporting prisoners, they would be free to experiment with new forms of punishment. McKean supported penal reform generally and public labor in particular because it had a revenue-generating scheme that would finance the expansion of the prison.²⁰

Visibly humiliating labor provided a new twist on the old practice of public shaming. The practice of public shaming was used by many colonies with impunity, subjecting women and men to the stock, pillory, branding, and public carting.²¹ Pennsylvania Quakers, however, were less violent than New England Puritans or those in the culture of violence that characterized the slaveholding southern colonies. The fact that they shied away from forms of corporal punishment widely used by other colonies and championed in the mother country has been attributed to their aversion to “unusual cruelty, suffering and the shedding of blood.”²² Quakers generally resorted to fines over corporal punishment, making this reinvigorated call for shame in punishment curious. But rather than reflect the public shaming of old, punishment by public labor was a forward-looking response to the breakdown in social hierarchy and deference that propelled the revolution. The combination of hard work and public shame was the perfect tool—timely and necessary—for reasserting not just law and order, but hierarchy.²³

The reform aspect of public punishment hinged on prisoners having certain emotional reactions to their experience. It was essential that those subjected to it embrace a feeling of disgrace. The law itself stated that labor was to be “publicly and disgracefully imposed” while the dress of prisoners was to be “formed with every mark of disgrace.”²⁴ Outfits marked with bold, unattractive stripes made from the coarsest of fabrics were one component. The iron collar around one’s neck, attached by a chain to a heavy metal ball, was certainly a mark of degradation. On top of all that, convicts were to be “disgracefully treated” in every imaginable way. Reformers believed that deep personal shame was a key ingredient in motivating people to try to change their ways.²⁵ But creating conditions to incite a feeling of disgrace was easier said than done. Two seemingly competing forces made public punishment short-lived and untenable: the sentimental project of elites and the rejection of both authority and reform by those condemned.

First, consider the actions of the men. The men sentenced to public punishment became known as “wheelbarrow men” because they pushed wheelbarrows through the streets. They embraced this collective identity imposed on them and redirected it for their own aims.²⁶ Wheelbarrow men themselves refused to embody and express the feelings reformers desired or predicted. Convicts did not defer to authority, bury their heads in shame, or succumb under the weight of guilt and remorse. Rather, they maintained their own agendas. They embraced the opportunity to get out of the prison, talk to each other freely, and interact with the public. They taunted people walking by as they cleaned the streets. They begged for money. They were not diminished or disgraced by public punishment.

Rather, they were emboldened. A group of wheelbarrow men plotted a great escape from the prison. The plot was “previously laid,” since they had a coordinated strategy of “calling attention of the keepers to the main gate” while others climbed the walls of the yard. Mostly armed with knives and stones, a group of “about eighty” nearly succeeded in breaking through an iron gate before an assistant keeper “fired several shot at them.” When all was said and done, one was killed and seven were wounded.²⁷ They threatened people with violence, including the city’s squire. Some claimed that if they got their hands on the squire, Mr. Pollard, “They would cut his hair off and disfigure him so that he should not be known.”²⁸ In September 1787, several escaped by “getting into the common sewer” and were only captured “after a long and vigilant subterraneous pursuit.”²⁹ The largest escape occurred in 1788, when a group of thirty-three prisoners fled the grounds, few of whom were eventually recaptured. Some attribute an “unusual number of highway robberies and burglaries” later that year to this bunch, and this was widely thought a result of the wheelbarrow law.³⁰ Wheelbarrow men from Philadelphia routinely escaped. In the summer of 1788, four men were picked up in Baltimore as vagrants who were described as “wheelbarrow men from Pennsylvania.”³¹ They were again put out to work “on the public roads” of Baltimore County. In January 1789 several wheelbarrow men tried to escape from the jail in Philadelphia “by digging under the foundation of the building.” The jailor fired at and killed two or three of them.³² Noted for his hair, “cut remarkably short,” James Smith, also known as William Johnson, escaped the wheelbarrow in Philadelphia before being jailed in New Jersey for horse stealing. Weeks before, two other men were caught and charged with a housebreaking in New York. These men were reportedly described as “A part of the wheelbarrow gentry from Philadelphia, and which lately struck so much terror in the inhabitants of that city.”³³ Most significantly, one group of four men escaped together and quickly robbed a man they allegedly identified while working in the street at the wheelbarrow. The incident escalated, and the man was murdered. The wheelbarrow men were caught, convicted, and executed for this crime.³⁴

The actions of the escapees created a climate of fear in the city, threatening not only the viability of penal reform but also the very validity of government. People felt unsafe, and the young state appeared weak, unable to control even convicts. Philadelphia was well established as the home of state government and an important place for national political meetings. The chaos threatened not just the city but also the still weak and vulnerable national government. The ongoing violence created an obstacle for those promoting the city of Philadelphia as the ideal capital for the new nation. In 1788, the legislators claimed that Philadelphia was, “A place where lawless and wandering banditti of wheelbarrow men and the unwholesome effluvia of dirty streets, with many other nuisances, might endanger their health or lives, every hour of the day and night.”³⁵ Members of the General Assembly remarked that Philadelphia had better clean up its act if it hoped to have the Congress relocate there from New York, as it later would in 1790. Others warned that no one was safe walking on the streets of Philadelphia in the evening unless within reach of the night watch, an early form of neighborhood policing.³⁶

Dr. Benjamin Rush was the first to publicly outline the ways that public punishment undermined the sentimental project. Rush was a prominent physician who would become a leading voice in efforts to transform punishment. The basis for Rush’s critique was the idea that public punishment had the potential to elicit sympathy for criminals from an unsuspecting public.³⁷ Rush believed that sympathy and compassion misdirected at prisoners laboring in public would be socially disastrous – inspiring rage at the state for inflicting punishment and possibly deadening sympathy for those truly worthy.³⁸ When Rush delivered these ideas before a meeting of the Society for Promoting Political Inquiries at Benjamin Franklin’s house on March 9, 1787, those in attendance enthusiastically embraced his critique.³⁹ Rush’s lecture and its dissemination in printed form would inspire and shape public debate on the subject for years, until the law was repealed in 1790. His arguments incited fear in lawyers, judges, and reformers that convicts working in chains in the city streets would elicit excessive or improper emotions in its citizens. Further, he feared that harsh punishments led to a hardened people—exactly the opposite of what he aspired to for himself and his community.⁴⁰

Public punishment was by all counts a disaster. It made the city seem less safe rather than more safe. It was not crime itself, however, that created social chaos but rather ineffective punishment. It inspired an expansion of policing efforts that ultimately targeted the poor. It is easy to cite Rush’s essay as the basis for abandoning public punishment, but to do so obscures the impact of actual rebellion, violence, and disorder. Rush’s ideas about the confused emotions and moral corruption of innocent bystanders changed the conversation from one of the real resistance and violence of the wheelbarrow men to a more distant intellectual exercise in hypothetical interactions. Looking back on the end of public punishment, reformer Caleb Lownes centered his critique on the prisoners themselves, noting how punishment failed to reform them. Lownes plainly states, “Disgraceful labour or treatment of any kind, it has not had, nor can have, any valuable tendency towards restoring an offender to usefulness in society, and it is therefore discontinued.”⁴¹ This most public, visible, and physical of punishments failed because those targeted refused to internalize its lessons. Public punishment did not instigate an appropriate response in the hearts and minds of the prisoners, regardless of its emotional impact on citizens.

The actions of the wheelbarrow men and the public debates over the significance of this policy obscured the existence of women in prison. While the rhetoric up to this point suggests that men alone were the targets of penal reform measures, this was simply not the case. Ample evidence shows women laboring away in a workhouse during this period. In 1787, the Acting Committee of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons (PSAMPP) reported that women in the workhouse were busy “spinning &c. and making shifts for the men.”⁴² A workhouse calendar from 1789 confirms that female convicts, vagrants, and runaways worked side by side, including three women who were convicted of stealing.⁴³ Anyone who read the Pennsylvania Gazette would be reminded of the women in prison by the advertisements that asked for “Any old blankets, shoes, stockings, mens and womens apparel” to be delivered to the prison.⁴⁴ From 1787 through 1790, women constituted anywhere from 10.4 to 21.9 percent of the convict population and nearly half of all inmates when vagrants and runaways were included.⁴⁵ There are a number of reasons women were not ordered to labor in the street alongside men.

Women and men were distinct entities under English common law. The legal and social distinctions between men and women were deemed to be a substantive basis for different treatment by the courts. This distinction was adopted by the American legal system and remained in place well into the late nineteenth century, designated by the phrase “from the consideration of her sex.”⁴⁶ Married men were responsible for the actions of their wives. Women who broke the law were at times given the benefit of the doubt before the courts, assuming that they were under the influence of a man. Women who broke the law were simply less significant than men who did the same. They were already held in the lowest regard by male judges, reformers, and elites. There was no need to make a spectacle of them through public shaming because women in prison were believed to be already disgraced. Furthermore, the public shaming of dissolute women might further taint the public viewing the spectacle. And so most reformers were content to assess the effectiveness of the penal law as it pertained to men. In his characterization of the failure of public punishment, Rush focused solely on the wheelbarrow men. In a 1787 letter to New York reformer John Coakley Lettsom, Rush wrote, “From the experience of our citizens of the bad effects of our wheelbarrow law (as ’tis called), it will probably be repealed. This I hope will pave the way for the adoption of solitude and labor as the means of not only punishing but reforming criminals.”⁴⁷ Rush, like most others, ignored the impact of the law on women in prison, quite possibly presuming that it did not have any.

But the fact that public punishment was not applied to women had lasting consequences. Chiefly, it ensured that the dominant public perception of criminality was male. Convict men were hypervisible in both the streets and the press as wheelbarrow men raised havoc, resisted authority, and made great escapes. While the behavior of prisoners was cited as a significant reason for the abolition of public labor in 1790, it was actually the behavior of male prisoners that necessitated the change. The failure of public punishments inspired reforms that dramatically affected prisoners of both sexes for decades—even centuries—to come. The four years of public punishment (1786–1790) were critical for marking the male body as the physical embodiment of criminality and transforming the meaning and function of punishment.⁴⁸ They inspired the adoption of punishment by hard labor in a far more controllable, predictable environment—behind the walls of the penitentiary.

Runaways

Wheelbarrow men were not the only group to resist order, discipline, or punishment in the streets, institutions, and homes of the city. Five women escaped from prison in 1796. Three white women, Pricilla Roberts, Catherine Lynch, and Joan Holland, made it all the way to Baltimore before being recaptured.⁴⁹ Two others, African American Phebe Mines and Irish Margaret McGill, also escaped through the dungeon and into Sixth Street with the group as well.⁵⁰ Women also regularly contested the terms of their employment, indenture, enslavement, and imprisonment. They negotiated with employers, resisted masters, and sometimes escaped altogether. The 1780s and 1790s were record decades for enslaved and bound workers rising up against authorities in seeking freedom. From 1780 to 1789, in the city of Philadelphia alone, over four hundred enslaved people either were manumitted or ran away.⁵¹ In the 1790s, more bound servants and enslaved people were imprisoned for running away or standing up to abusive masters than ever before.⁵² Women who were caught running away or resisting the terms of their employment constituted the largest single category of those charged with vagrancy—as one-third of all vagrants in 1795.⁵³ As news spread of the Haitian Revolution in which enslaved blacks took up arms against their oppressors, African Americans were inspired to believe that they too could free themselves from the bonds of slavery.

Advertisements for runaway servants, enslaved people, and escaped convicts used nearly identical language and formats, signaling the groups were held in similarly low regard. People placed ads to announce and describe those who ran away, often calling for someone to deliver the runaway person to the nearest jail if captured.⁵⁴ When an enslaved woman named Dina ran away in search of freedom, she had not committed any crime. For innocent enslaved and convicted people in search of freedom, the ads usually ended with a line similar to the one concerning Dina: “Whoever takes up said Negroe Woman and secures her in any gaol, so that her master may have her again, shall have THREE POUNDS reward, and reasonable charges, if brought home, paid by David Carson.”⁵⁵ Readers were thus encouraged to identify, capture, and transport runaway servants and slaves to the prison for holding—treating them as criminals. While an increasing number of Pennsylvanians supported the abolition of slavery by 1780, many people still felt differently when it came to their own servants or slaves. Even leading prison reformers who were antislavery advocates were content to accept this function of the prison as a place to contain those seeking freedom.

Vagrancy laws provided the legal justification for the imprisonment of runaways. They were loosely defined yet powerful tools used to reassert social and economic hierarchies. The vagrancy records themselves did not distinguish clearly between servant and slave when recording instances of runaways. Rather, they designate only the category of “master” or “mistress” in referring to the aggrieved party. The ambiguity of status in the records challenges us to think more carefully not only about the blurred boundaries between the two but also about the limits of freedom more broadly for both groups. While servant and slave remained distinct legal categories, they were increasingly treated similarly under the law after the Gradual Abolition Act created a new class of African American servants.⁵⁶ Significant numbers of African Americans would have been servants rather than slaves, as gradual abolition required children of slaves to serve terms of extended servitude to age twenty-eight.⁵⁷ African American women working as domestics in the 1790s could have been enslaved, servants, or hired. Of the nearly two thousand free blacks in Philadelphia in 1790, half were women who worked in white households.⁵⁸ Regardless of status, they were all vulnerable to the same treatment. Poor whites, especially bound servants, also faced harrowing treatment at the hands of masters and jailers. In Philadelphia during this period, the sad truth was that the working lives of servants of both European and African descent were remarkably limited and with many parallels to enslavement.⁵⁹ Neither the spirit of the American Revolution nor post-Revolutionary penal reforms changed any of this.

Though Anglo-Americans controlled the political, legal, and economic systems that shaped the lives of African Americans as well as servants of European descent, they seemed genuinely upset and threatened by expressions of resistance and disobedience. But it is precisely this structural imbalance that requires us to skeptically assess the fairness of any law that criminalized acts of freedom seeking in a time and place that celebrated freedom seeking from British rule, arbitrary authority, and the like. It is difficult to take seriously concerns about the disobedient servants, free blacks, and rebellious workers when the state was aligned with those who claimed ownership over their lives, bodies, and time, and laws were easily bent to this aim. From the earliest years of the Pennsylvania colony, laws punished runaway servants with five extra days in service for each day absent.⁶⁰ Imprisonment of runaways was one step in a disciplinary process aimed at returning them to their proper place.⁶¹

The increase in the number of African Americans running away, fighting with, or otherwise disobeying their masters fueled the growing animosity of elite whites toward free blacks. When a black woman named Patience refused to work, her master had her charged “with being a refractory and disorderly negroe woman who refuses to perform any kind of labour for her subsistence.”⁶² When an African American servant named Jantie left the service of Joseph Elton, she successfully evaded authorities for over a week. Upon her capture, she spent four days in the vagrancy ward before her enraged master had her “delivered to Mrs. Weed” at the prison for an undeclared charge—and a punishment we can scarcely imagine.⁶³ Patience and Jantie were two of dozens of black women who challenged those who claimed possession of them, and got a brief taste of freedom, however elusive. The prison also served as a holding tank for those suspected of being slaves. One woman named Sall from Little Creek in Delaware was held for eleven months on the unconfirmed assumption that she was a slave.⁶⁴ Masters had complete discretion over how long to leave slaves or servants locked up and how many lashes to have administered by the jailer.

The prison was not necessarily a totalizing institution of social control but could also serve as an intermediate space that constantly changed in response to challenges from within and without. Freedom was mediated through the prison in two directions. While the prison served as a tool of elites to manage a resistant labor force, workers also used the prison as a way to resist the abuses of servitude and conspire about ways to escape or to survive once released.⁶⁵ Victorie ran away from John Imbert on July 29, 1795. She was captured and imprisoned under charge of being his slave. Authorities doubted this claim, and Mayor Hilary Baker called for an investigation and imprisonment of Victorie until a judge decided to release her. John Imbert reclaimed her on August 2nd, but she quickly ran away again, only to be re-imprisoned on August 3rd. Such determination to escape despite near certain capture suggests Victorie had a profound claim to freedom. These records of runaways, however, scarcely document the trauma and horrors experienced by those enslaved.⁶⁶ The official reporting of runaways in the newspapers and court records are one-sided. They do not tell us why Victorie ran away or how she was feeling. But we can discern that for the enslaved Victorie, risking life in prison was better than life with John Imbert. She remained in prison for two months, possibly until he could find someone else to buy her time. While short of freedom, Victorie may have felt relief at the chance to get away from a much-hated abusive master.⁶⁷ The prison could also serve as a safe haven from slaveholders. When four children ranging in age from four to twelve were discovered in the Washington City Jail, one jailer reported that the children’s aunt placed them there “to keep them out of the hands of a man, who wished to sell them as slaves.” Even though the conditions of the jail were horrid, and one of the children suffered with scant clothing and illness, their beloved relative felt this terrible circumstance gave them a better chance at life and freedom.⁶⁸

The extent to which servants and slaves tried to shape their own fate in the face of great opposition was remarkable. Some servants ran away repeatedly or refused to leave prison to return to the home of their captor. When twelve-year-old Clarissa Morris ran away from Margaret Tucker of South Fourth Street, Tucker offered a one-dollar reward and reasonable charges for the return of Morris, a woman described as mulatto and objectified in an advertisement as having “frizzled hair, a good set of teeth, and is narrow visaged.”⁶⁹ Once Tucker recovered Morris, Tucker decided to sell the remainder of her term of indenture to someone else. Tucker may have obscured Morris’s rebellious spirit when negotiating the sale, but it could not be suppressed for long.⁷⁰ Morris ran away from her new master, George Springer. She again was picked up on vagrancy charges in February 1807 and sentenced to one month for running away.⁷¹ This group of women frustrated their owners so much that the latter relented in selling or trading them. Samuel Clarkson offered a five-dollar reward in the Philadelphia Gazette for the delivery of his servant Susanna Ware, whom he described as “an indented Irish servant, aged about 26 years, of a fair complection, her features rather coarse, she took with her several changes of clothes.”⁷² Ware enjoyed three weeks of freedom before being picked up and held on vagrancy charges in November 1795.⁷³ Clarkson left her in prison for sixty days, signaling that he had lost control of her and resorted to extreme measures to discipline her. The fact that she stole from him extended her punishment and increased the likelihood that he would search for someone to buy or trade the remaining time of her indenture. Elizabeth Folmer ran away from her master Thomas Palmer and “remained absent six or seven weeks.”⁷⁴ Similar to Morris and Ware were Anna Guster and George Roth, who ran away from a term of bound servitude on the farm of Charles Greguire.⁷⁵ When captured, they refused to go back to his farm. He left them in prison, waiting for them to change their minds or for someone else to buy out their indentures. Roth eventually gave in and was discharged back to Greguire’s farm in December, but Anna held out for two more months.⁷⁶ Even though the cards were stacked against them, each of these women got a taste of freedom. This process offered servants and slaves the hope of a different kind of life: a less abusive master, or one step closer to freedom.

Masters and mistresses were more likely to seek the assistance of the state in disciplining servants and slaves of African descent than the vast population of English and Irish servants, signaling their discomfort with controlling the African American members of their households and an expectation that the state would help them regulate its black residents.⁷⁷ When African American Phebe Bowers allegedly “threaten[ed] the life of her mistress Rebecca Conway” she was punished by imprisonment without trial and denied bread for fourteen days.⁷⁸ In 1790, over half of the masters and mistresses exercised their discretion to release their prisoners in less than the standard term of thirty days. For example, Mila was discharged after only four days. She was described as “the property of William Lewis, esq” and he ordered her discharge and delivery to a Mr Todd.⁷⁹ Elizabeth Nen was held for only fifteen days, having run away from “her master” Henry Clanse.⁸⁰ The conditions in prison were deplorable; inmates were often stripped of their clothing, minimally fed, and left to defecate in their own cells. Only the most refractory and uncontrollable of white servants were punished in this manner. When Elizabeth McCoy was charged with “obstinately refusing to obey the lawfull commands of her Mistress Mary Robinson,” she was imprisoned for only three days but denied bread.⁸¹ The harsher punishment of African Americans has several explanations. Whites consistently felt more entitled to black labor than they did to that of native born whites or even immigrants who might share their own European ancestry. For whites, slavery still reflected a financial investment, making the rebellion of a slave both a social and a financial threat, whereas servants could more easily be replaced. African Americans may have been more likely to attempt freedom than others—and were probably more often mistreated in the first place.

Women of both European and African ancestry were imprisoned together. Sarah Evans and Elizabeth Folmer both arrived on September 17, 1795. Evans received a very strict punishment upon escaping her apprenticeship to Joshua Peeling. She was kept in prison for four months before being discharged to the almshouse.⁸² One can only imagine her ordeal—and the stories she and other women would share during those four months. Elizabeth Folmer had it comparatively easy. Though she left her master Thomas Palmer, she was released from prison after two weeks. Even more importantly, she experienced “six or seven weeks” of freedom before being caught in the first place.⁸³ When Evans and Folmer arrived, an enslaved woman named Jane was already there, serving thirty days on charges of “being a very refractory disobedient girl and of absenting herself from her mistress service.”⁸⁴ When Margaret Mullen entered the prison on September 18th, she would have met a number of other runaways and possibly shared a room with Sarah, Elizabeth, or Jane. Mullen was bound to John Cardner and punished for five days for her attempt at escape.⁸⁵ Despite the harsh conditions of the prison, the companionship of other young women who shared their plight may have been a welcome relief from the strict orders, overbearing meddling, or abuse of a master or mistress.

Men of wealth and political power were especially frustrated by the resistance and rebellion of their domestic help during this contentious period and were twice as likely as women to file charges for the punishment and capture of runaways.⁸⁶ In 1791, Nance, was charged with thirty days of hard labor for “being disorderly and disobedient to her master William Pollard Esq.”⁸⁷ Eliza Johnson was described as a “mullato” and charged with “very bad behavior to her master Hugh McCollough.”⁸⁸ Matilda Pringle was a bound servant who ran away from Doctor James Tate.⁸⁹ Eleanor Moor was charged with “disorderly behaviour by her master Hugh Moon,” while Rebecca “negress” was charged for “misbehavior to her master.”⁹⁰ A gutsy young woman described as “Marinet blk girl” was charged “on the solemn affirmation of John McLeed with being his indentured sevt. And greatly misbehaving herself towards her said master and his family.”⁹¹ In 1791, Catharine Frame was said to be “misbehaving herself toward her master and mistress Hugh Saveing and wife and being with child and refusing to tell the father of it,” and sent to prison “to be kept at labour thirty days” as punishment.⁹² The fact that men with social capital and political authority struggled to maintain order in their own homes is dramatically revealing. If women in their service refused their authority, how could they expect deference of their wives or command the respect of colleagues? Such challenges to their authority could have a ripple effect that would be uncomfortable at best, disastrous at worst. Rather than respect the increasing attempts of servants and those enslaved to grasp freedom and autonomy, elites chose to denigrate the character of the lower sorts and embrace the expansion of penal authority.

This list of powerful, learned men who imprisoned their female domestic help for challenging their authority goes on. Emanuel Eyre was appointed to the Philadelphia County Assembly with four others in an announcement that also named sheriffs, coroners, and the commissioner John Baker. On July 1, 1790, an enslaved woman named Phillis was “charged with deserting her masters service Emanuel Eyres to be kept at hard labour for one month.” She was held for 26 days.⁹³ When Francis Hopkinson died, Williams Lewis was appointed judge of the District Court for the District of Pennsylvania by the president of the United States in July 1791. Not long before, Lewis had ordered an enslaved woman Mila first to prison for disobedience and then to a Mr. Todd, likely as a sale.⁹⁴ Edward was the mathematical and writing master at the English School of the Philadelphia Academy. He and his wife charged Justina, their “negress” servant, with “behaving herself exceedingly indolent and disobedient.” She was released September 11, 1795, by Hilary Baker.⁹⁵ Alice Cassady was punished for running away from Captain John Foster in July of 1795 and then by John Kean, a successful merchant, in September of that same year.⁹⁶ Peter Blight was named a director of the Insurance Company of North America in January 1795. Months later, he ordered his servant Catharine Louise Figg to prison for stealing from him and running away. She was discharged after two months.⁹⁷ Men sought the help of the state in managing the laboring women in their lives.

Conflict between female laborers and the women who controlled their labor were also common.⁹⁸ Mistresses were rarely sympathetic allies of their bound laborers but instead turned to the state for assistance with disciplining and punishing those who refused their orders. Widows especially struggled. Mary Meredith was widowed when her husband Daniel, a brass founder, died in 1777.⁹⁹ In 1790, Mary struggled to maintain her authority over the eslaved Dinah. Dinah was charged with “being idle disorderly and disobedient towards her mistress Mary Meredith to be kept at labour thirty days.”¹⁰⁰ Dinah was released after just two weeks, signaling that Mary needed Dinah back helping in the house. The widow Souder charged her servant Sarah Morton with assault and threatening.¹⁰¹ Souder was probably married to Casper Souder, who had owned a tavern in Northern Liberties. He must have died sometime between 1784 and 1795.¹⁰² In 1790, Nancy was charged with “disobeying the lawful commands of her mistress to be kept at hard labour,” though she stayed in prison for only four days.¹⁰³ Servant and enslaved women could terrorize their mistresses just as some mistresses surely terrorized their workers. In 1795, Calypso was held for “being a very ill tempered and of behaving very indolent toward her mistress madam [?] and others.”¹⁰⁴ The conflict between enslaved and bound workers and privileged women who owned their labor was not mollified by any sense of shared suffering or the marginalization of their sex. Mistresses reported more difficulty with insubordination than masters did. While men would mostly be away from home conducting business, meeting with friends, or visiting coffeehouses, women worked closely with servants and slaves in accomplishing domestic tasks, day in and day out. Mistresses constantly ordered, monitored, and disciplined their servants and slaves, making the possibility for direct conflict even greater. The ideological basis for elites to treat domestic help with mistrust, contempt, and violence was already established by the institution of slavery. For example, in Berks County, just outside Philadelphia, a white woman named Elizabeth Bishop murdered her black female servant without consequence in 1772, even though the evidence established her guilt.¹⁰⁵

The slave labor economy defined social roles and expectations in ways that justified systemic violence against African Americans. As Thavolia Glymph has shown, enslaved women in a later period in the U.S. South were expected to undertake an extensive, often impossible list of tasks and “to do these things in silence and reverence, barefooted and ill-clothed.”¹⁰⁶ When enslaved women questioned, challenged, or failed to meet these impossible expectations, they could be beaten, abused, or sold away from loved ones.¹⁰⁷ The anecdotes cited from the vagrancy dockets capture what Glymph describes as “a kind of warring intimacy” between mistresses and those enslaved.¹⁰⁸ Even the most minor challenge or imperfection could be viewed by a mistress as justification for extreme violence. Just as slaveholding mistresses were not held accountable for their role in household violence, the same can be said of Philadelphia’s elite men and women. Spared the association with violent overseers who might enforce discipline in the plantation South, elite whites in the city turned to the state to enact violence and impose order for them.

Prison Labor

The early years of manufacturing coincided with the quest for new ways to discipline rebellious workers. While some states still relied on corporal punishment, capital punishment, and general ill treatment of the condemned, Pennsylvanians were eager to expand on the almshouse-style institutional labor regimes and transform prisoners into a disciplined workforce. British reformers provided Pennsylvanians with the idea of building self-sustaining, lucrative manufacturing systems inside of prisons. Just months after Benjamin Rush delivered his lecture against public punishment at Benjamin Franklin’s house, many in attendance became charter members of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons. PSAMPP members exchanged frequent letters with their British counterparts about prison labor and published a pamphlet full of anecdotes from British prisons.¹⁰⁹ PSAMPP sought to assure the public of the value and effectiveness of prison-based manufactories by citing the general order achieved in British prisons by this system. A manufactory of a Norfolk, England, prison specialized in cutting logwood and working with hemp to turn it into a usable material. The beating, heckling, and spinning of hemp was very dirty and smelly—and quickly adopted in Walnut Street Prison shortly thereafter. Who better to do the most distasteful tasks than prisoners?

While the impetus and support for introducing labor in prison came from British reformers, it was also rooted in the distinctly American impulse to develop a manufactory system that could free it from dependence on British imports. Advocates for manufacturing claimed the longterm financial viability of a sovereign state hinged on an increase in production.¹¹⁰ One commentator asserted that manufacturing was key to the wealth and future of the nation, claiming, “A nation composed of farmers, without a due intermixture of manufacturers and mechanics, must, sooner or latter, degenerate to the condition of mere labourers.”¹¹¹ Manufacturing innovations were featured in local magazines and newspapers. In rural Pennsylvania, the spinning wheel was touted as a “fashionable piece of family furniture.”¹¹² Some believed the popularity of spinning, along with the establishment of looms, cultivation of flax, and efforts to increase the quantity of wool would enable the United States to become independent. Artisans and manufacturers regularly complained about the waste of the nation’s wealth on the purchase of imported goods that were either unnecessary or could just as easily be produced in the colonies.¹¹³ As textile manufacturing grew, it played an increasingly important role in expanding Pennsylvania’s involvement in the Atlantic trade.¹¹⁴ Groups of manufacturers, merchants, and capitalists came together to promote their views in organizations such as the Pennsylvania Society for the Encouragement of Manufactures and the Useful Arts, formed in 1787—the same year as PSAMPP.¹¹⁵ The two groups had much in common, including expanding the productive capacity of the nation and putting convicts, vagrants, runaways, and immigrants to work. Arguments for putting the idle, poor, and criminal classes to work were circular. For those living outside the law, hard work would provide the discipline and structure they needed to allow for the reordering of their minds. For poor people, labor would keep them from a state of idleness, which was thought to lead to lawlessness. Idleness, then, was the greatest source of chaos and evil; it moved a poor person to a life of crime and stood in the way of a convict’s reformation.

The development of a penal system with labor at its core was intimately linked to this larger economic and political culture. Pennsylvania was the first state to embrace this connection when it passed An Act to Reform the Penal Laws of this State in 1790. The act required that the offender “undergo a servitude of any term or time” up to ten years while being “kept at such labor and fed and clothed.”¹¹⁶ With this directive, the modern penitentiary was made. This new system of punishment was put to the test at Walnut Street Jail, officially renamed Walnut Street Prison in 1790 with the passage of this law. The key distinctions would be forced labor behind closed doors and a newly authorized Board of Inspectors to oversee operations and management. Walnut Street Prison served as the nation’s first penitentiary and the destination for all those convicted and sentenced to one year or more in prison from across the state of Pennsylvania.

The Board of Inspectors quickly declared three goals for the new system: public security, reformation, and humane treatment of prisoners.¹¹⁷ An explicit concern with the treatment and well being of prisoners reflected an entirely new attitude toward those condemned. The belief that those convicted of serious offenses against society should be attended to rather than cast away seemed a radical departure from early modern corporal punishment.¹¹⁸ But this proposed humane treatment quickly became rigidly inhumane, defined by the strict ordering, regulation, and manipulation of bodies. The Board aspired to instill order in ways large and small; first, they restricted interaction with outsiders, prohibited drinking, and separated men and women. That part was easy and served to support the chief aim of punishment: the promotion of “habits of industry” through “solitude, low diet, and hard labor.”¹¹⁹ Labor was still at the heart of punishment, but to what end? The widely documented aims of penal labor—to punish, to generate revenue, and to reform—could easily be at odds with each other.¹²⁰

Judges, prison guards, and reformers debated the real aim of prison labor. Was work intended to make the penitentiary self-sufficient, contribute to industry, or reform the inmates? Benjamin Rush and other visionaries believed that successful manufactories would signal successful punishment, defined by the transformation of convicts into productive liberal subjects. Rush insisted punishment should combine hard labor with bodily pain, solitude, watchfulness, silence, cleanliness, and a simple diet, and that these conditions would encourage individual transformation.¹²¹ Inspectors quickly departed from a literal interpretation of the law that called for labor “of the hardest and most servile kind” when they recognized that the most profitable labor was often not the most servile.¹²² When profit motives and reform motives contradicted each other, there was no clear consensus as to which was more highly prized. Hard labor in prison seemed like an ideal remedy for a range of social and economic ills. It would serve as punishment for those who refused or were unable to live and work in the ways that elites had hoped. Elites had very specific expectations for how the poor and working classes should live their lives: work hard, avoid the streets at night, attend church, and be honest, respectful, modest, and submissive.¹²³ Those who failed or refused any one of these things were more likely to end up in prison, a place that was now thought to be capable of providing proper discipline to transform them into productive workers.

The work of inmates was grouped and managed first according to sexual difference.¹²⁴ Authorities were generally ambivalent about women inside early American prisons. They did not make special rules for them but informally modified the policies as they saw fit.¹²⁵ Women were grouped all together by sex. Men were also grouped together by sex but then further divided by the type of work they performed. When the Board put Francis Higgins in charge of overseeing the labor in prison, they asked him to keep a record of the work of each group, listing “women convicts” as a group and then detailing the work of men as “shoemakers, woolcarders, weavers, carpenters, logwood chippers.”¹²⁶ While women were put to work doing tasks that were considered unskilled but which they presumably already knew how to do, men were offered the opportunity to learn a trade in the prison workhouse that they could then use to “maintain themselves and become useful members of society.”¹²⁷ Inspectors boasted, for instance, of the large number of apprentices who worked in the shoemaking division. Male prisoners were offered the opportunity to earn wages from their labor to cover their costs, and then give the surplus to their families. The Inspectors reported paying the wife of an inmate from his wages “to assist her in her present embarrassments.”¹²⁸ While men’s manufactories were unpredictable in their productivity, they did generate revenue, produce goods, and offer skill development to some inmates, some of the time.

Men’s work was divided into two major categories—one for ablebodied men and another for those men who were too old, weak, or infirm to do “men’s” work. Such a distinction created a class of prisoners who did not fit neatly into the prison labor system based on sexual difference. Too old or weak or infirm to work in the men’s manufactories, these men were assigned some of the same tasks as the women.¹²⁹ This was an accepted fact of life: the declining physical abilities of men who lived very hard lives marked by poverty, movement, and manual labor. The creation of a second category of work for men who were unable to do men’s work revealed the temporality and fragility of the division along lines of sexual difference. It did not, however, open up opportunities for young, strong, robust, or skilled women who might take their place. The disruption of the gendered order of labor was a one-way street. Men could safely take up women’s work, but women, however capable or strong, were not permitted to do the work of men.

Valuation of women’s work was generally half that given to men’s, a signal of their inferior position in the labor market more generally.¹³⁰ An early group of Inspectors valued the work of women cooks and washers at one shilling six pence. The male cook, designated “the first cook,” was allotted three shillings three pence.¹³¹ In 1809, the value of women’s work was set at twenty-five cents per day for those “Spinners, washers, and other able bodied whose employment is irregular.”¹³² The same report assesses thirty cents a day to “able bodied men whose employment is irregular.” The value of women’s work actually declined over time. In 1812, it was set at “no more than 20 cents per day.”¹³³ By 1816, one week of work in prison earned women one-third to one-half of what men earned.¹³⁴ Women’s work was also used as a justification for serving female prisoners smaller quantities of food than men. Because their tasks were “less laborious” than men’s, they received the “same quality” of mush, potatoes, and bread but in smaller portions than the men received.¹³⁵ This distinction between the valuation of men and women’s work was made passively. The Board presented their resolution that the payment for women’s labor be lowered using passive voice. The report claimed that because “no particular price is fixed” to women’s work, it was worth less than work that had a fixed price; yet the Inspectors themselves made the decision not to assign it a specific value. Just as men’s wages were determined by the number of pairs of shoes produced or number of nails headed, women’s work could have been valued by the number of shifts made or yards of flax spun. But it was not so valued.

While the Inspectors refused to recognize the value of women’s labor, others following the debates over penal reform noticed that women in prison labored productively and diligently—even as men were causing chaos in the streets with wheelbarrows. An essay in the American Museum, possibly written by the publisher Mathew Carey, highlighted women’s institutional labor: “Hitherto the female criminals, condemned to labour, have been prudently placed in the work-house, where, it is said, their earnings have been equal to the cost of their food and clothes.”¹³⁶ Women served as model prisoners and showed how the system of forced labor could be economically advantageous, while wheelbarrow men demonstrated chaos, violence, and resistance. Even those women who were considered dissolute and incorrigible could be transformed by imprisonment and “gradually reconciled to labour and industry.” The key to this process was a careful balance between discipline and encouragement, delivered through a “strict but not cruel superintendence.”¹³⁷ The American Museum was a popular publication that enjoyed a diverse readership, including some of the most powerful men in the country.¹³⁸ Failure to address the gendered dimensions of penal reform, then, was intentional—and not because people did not realize that women were imprisoned.

Women’s productive labor was in fact vital to the maintenance of the institution.¹³⁹ By the 1790s, women made the clothing for both themselves and male prisoners. Inspector Lownes reported, “Most of the clothing, at present, is spun, wove, and made up in the house, and is designed to be so altogether in future.”¹⁴⁰ This was modeled after the system used in the House of Employment, where women were reportedly employed at “carding, spinning, knitting, sewing, & c.” for decades.¹⁴¹ Spinning was a common task for women and a staple of institutional work regimes.¹⁴² Women produced coarse linen for other convicts to wear and fine linen for sale to the public.¹⁴³ Women worked at “washing and cleaning their apartments.”¹⁴⁴ Vagrant women were left with the more repulsive task of “picking Hair.”¹⁴⁵ Inmates picked a variety of materials for various uses: hair for bedding, okum for building, and wool for clothing. Picking hair was a “disgusting” assignment that reportedly could “create distemper.” A former inmate complained that the smell was so awful as “to cause many of them to vomit, and set all hands to coughing.”¹⁴⁶

The number of references to naked prisoners or those “said to have no cloathing” highlights the urgency of the task at hand for women charged with making clothes. The Visiting Committee of PSAMPP reported in 1804 one “young woman of the name of Sarah Keys who is said to have no cloathing but a shift, Sarah Hopple in near the same situation.”¹⁴⁷ The material used to make the clothing was “tow-linen,” the grade of material often used for “wagon-covers and house-cloths, not even bleached.”¹⁴⁸ This was the same grade of cloth specially imported to clothe slaves in Caribbean and southern colonies. Men assisted women with clothing production, as they wove the fabric while women “made up” the article itself.¹⁴⁹ This was consistent with artisan work practices also going out of fashion during the period. Women and children spun, men wove, and women sewed the clothing. Women’s labor in prison was both indispensable and hidden, much as the work of enslaved and indentured servants was for centuries. The system of sex-segregated labor in which women produced much of the clothing and bedding used by prisoners cultivated a culture of men’s domestic dependence on women and women’s economic dependence on men in return. The prison-based economic system exploited women’s labor for the gain of the institution. As a prisoner, a woman sustained male prisoners for nothing in return.¹⁵⁰

African American and first generation immigrant women faced greater limitations and were disproportionately restricted to domestic work as servants, seamstresses, and laundresses. It was generally impossible for women to earn enough money to cover their expenses, pay off fines or fees, and have anything to keep for themselves. The only existing record of a financial account for a woman in the penitentiary’s early years reveals that the low pay rate scarcely came close. The account of Elizabeth Clinton from York County covers the period from December 31, 1803, to April 15, 1804. In that time, she received provisions worth $13.60 along with shoes $.93, blankets $2.50, and clothes $5.98, costing a total of $23.01. Her total earnings paled in comparison. She was “compensated” $5.00 for her washing and $7.60 for her sewing, a total of $12.60, leaving her indebted to the institution for $10.41.¹⁵¹ Records such as these were more commonly kept for prisoners from counties outside Philadelphia because city commissioners sought reimbursement from surrounding counties.

The fulfillment of the domestic tasks of the penitentiary necessitated a steady flow of women into the prison. This remarkable dimension of the relationship between gender and punishment has scarcely been acknowledged by either reformers or historians. This correlation is only noted in a reprinted account from a British prison that PSAMPP circulated in 1790. The passage argued that a larger prison could hold more women who could do more work—and even be offered more diverse duties.¹⁵² The system required the imprisonment of enough women to get the work of the prison done. Inspectors may have welcomed the imprisonment of skilled spinster Mary Davis and others like her who could train women and oversee the production of clothing.¹⁵³ A consistent population of women in prison enabled the management to ensure sufficient coverage of certain tasks, such as cleaning, spinning, making clothing, and caretaking. This is verified by the fact that women’s prison activity was always productive and never punitive. While a treadmill was authorized to be built in the city’s prisons, it was directed at men “to be used as a species of hard labour for such male prisoners as are liable to be placed to such punishment.”¹⁵⁴ Popular opinion was against having women on the treadmill because there were other forms of employment more “congenial to the habits of their sex.”¹⁵⁵ This remark refers not only to labor that was not physical but more importantly for work that was domestically productive.

Institutional work regimes narrowly defined and undervalued the productive labor of women, but beyond the walls of the prison, women’s work took many different forms and played a crucial role in early American economies.¹⁵⁶ Women worked in public markets, both formal and illicit, selling and bartering goods. They kept shops, taverns, and inns. Servants and slaves would handle whatever tasks they were assigned in homes, shops, and markets before picking up side jobs to earn extra money in their free time. For poor women, work always expanded far beyond the four walls of home. Economic pressures as early as the 1760s forced even middling women to take on some paid work.¹⁵⁷ In the 1790s, one-third of female heads of household worked as retail dealers or hucksters while another one-quarter worked as innkeepers and boardinghouse managers.¹⁵⁸ Others worked as schoolmistresses, midwives, nurses, cooks, seamstresses, mantua makers, and milliners.¹⁵⁹ Working women filled the streets of Philadelphia every day, selling their wares, shopping at markets, and running errands for themselves, their families, and their employers.¹⁶⁰ But even these efforts were challenged by crackdowns on tippling houses, hucksters, disorderly houses, prostitutes, and fences—all important sites of work for women.

Accurate accounting of women’s wealth can be difficult to find because of highly gendered assessment practices by constables.¹⁶¹ But there is no mistaking how quickly a woman could go from being productively selfsufficient to unemployed and destitute. Almshouse records show the economic vulnerability of women despite the range of jobs they held. Ann Robeson kept a store with her husband on Second Street near the corner of Black House Alley, but he had deserted her many years ago.¹⁶² Mary Conkline was a chambermaid at the city tavern, with a “bad sore leg” that eventually made it impossible for her to do her job.¹⁶³ Both women turned to the almshouse for support. Mr. Martin’s indentured servant Ann Dames was subject to fits that made her “incapable of being serviceable to him” and leading him to take her to the almshouse himself.¹⁶⁴ Women who long worked in the service of others at the city hospital were especially vulnerable to illness themselves. Jenny Byrnes worked as a nurse in one of the hospital wards but became too sick to continue.¹⁶⁵ Mary Hall served as the longtime cook at the city hospital before succumbing to illness and old age, making her a “very old helpless woman.”¹⁶⁶ Both women were admitted to the almshouse. Women who worked hard to piece together a living in health and youth could easily become sidelined by illness, injury, abandonment, or age. The line between dutiful worker and dependent was both thin and blurry.

While penal reformers had grand visions for turning male criminals into skilled and productive shoemakers, carpenters, nailers, and weavers, they did not train women in midwifery, mantua making, nursing, bartending, or bookkeeping.¹⁶⁷ Women’s work in prison was restricted to laundry, cleaning, spinning, and sewing—jobs leftover for the unskilled and poor and yet necessary for the maintenance of all prisons. The relegation of women’s work to distinctly domestic, unskilled, undervalued labor had several consequences. It aligned the disproportionately African American and immigrant inmates with forced domestic work, reasserting their proper place as servants in the homes of others despite the abolition of slavery and abandonment of indentured servitude. This particular sexual division of labor advanced a racialized notion of work that was not formalized within the institution until decades later. Second, it foreclosed on the wide array of work skills that women might have developed to succeed independently in the new republic, promoting instead their financial dependence on men and, as a result, reinscribing a heterosexual political economy.

But even women’s work outside prisons became less visible and less valued as a market-based economy developed in the early republic. As Jeanne Boydston has shown, women, like men, adjusted to the changing market forces that defined this precapitalist moment. While some women’s work might take place in the home, it still involved taking in out-work or increasing domestic production of items for sale or trade at the market. For women, even the visibly productive elements of household labor were becoming increasingly devalued.¹⁶⁸ The fact that so many women engaged in so many different forms of public labor became obscured by men’s struggles to secure wage work for themselves. Working poor families long relied on the contribution of women’s wages to meet the basic necessities of food, fuel, shelter, and clothing; those slightly better off may have used the income women earned to cover “the extra expenses of taxes, medical bills, candles, soap.”¹⁶⁹ The economy of early America was like a roller coaster. It caused nothing less than a crisis in the heterosexual political economy, breaking up families, forcing men to migrate for work and women into the marketplace. Most jobs were tied to the maritime economy, and both natural and international forces shaped the success of merchants, retailers, shipbuilders, and mariners.¹⁷⁰ Even skilled, able-bodied workingmen became less secure in their wage-earning ability—and less able to provide for their dependents. In spite of this—or possibly because of it—men’s work became more valued and visible. Long-standing recognition of the family as an economic unit was gradually replaced by the idea of the male breadwinner. And so women in prison were trained not to take on one of the diverse and profitable jobs that gave women an important place in the colonial economy but rather to assume the position of economic dependent. Women’s labor in prison at the end of the eighteenth century not only forecast but also helped to reassert a heterosexual political economy that erased the value of their work.

Submission

Reports of women’s submission to penal authorities and their embrace of institutional work assignments stood as powerful testimonies for liberal reform, even as women themselves were largely excluded from liberalism’s promises. Women’s work in prison was less monitored than men’s, leaving ample opportunity for women to refuse to work, joke around, or even fight with each other. But misbehavior was rarely documented. Instead, in institutional records from 1794 to 1835, women were nearly always reported to be working hard. In 1801, the Visiting Committee of the Acting Committee of PSAMPP noted great productivity among the women despite the fact that “idleness remains among men.”¹⁷¹ The women vagrants were “generally if not all employed.” As the years went by, the Committee noted that women were either working in similar numbers as before or at an even higher rate. In 1804 it described the women’s wing as “in a better situation generally than sometimes heretofore there being more of them employed.”¹⁷² In 1805 the Committee found many prisoners needed clothing and upon purchasing linen reported that one piece of it was “made into 11 shifts and 13 shirts” by female inmates.¹⁷³ The keeper reported that it took the women “their whole time nearly” to get their work done, a sign they worked steadily and dutifully.¹⁷⁴

Though reformers refused to speak of women’s work in anything but the passive voice, they did repeatedly recognize their productivity. The Visiting Committee pointed out “Flannell was made into shirts and shifts by the vagrant female prisoners.”¹⁷⁵ Two of the women who received the shifts, Kitty Spencer and Mary Ford, were being held in the dungeon. Kitty, described as “almost naked,” really needed much more than a shift.¹⁷⁶ Kitty was a nineteen-year-old African American woman sentenced to nine months at hard labor for stealing, of all things, clothing.¹⁷⁷ And so reformers noted that women helped to clothe other women in prison but did so passively.

Reports of female productivity were juxtaposed with those of male idleness. Men were reported positively only in the earliest years.¹⁷⁸ But even then, reports of male idleness outnumbered positive accounts. In 1795, the Inspectors noted, “The stone cutters do not cut the quantity of stone they are capable of.”¹⁷⁹ The following year, a detailed scheme of punishment through food deprivation was established for those in the nail factory who did not work to their potential. The Inspectors reported that prisoners who failed to complete a “reasonable days work” would be denied breakfast for the first day and both breakfast and dinner should they underproduce for two consecutive days. Continued failure to meet the requirements resulted in solitary confinement.¹⁸⁰ In October 1820, the Visiting Committee noted, “About 20 females were spinning and knitting for the convicts, the males have not employment.”¹⁸¹ Constant reporting of male idleness fueled ongoing debates about the role of labor in punishment and the effectiveness of punishment more broadly.

Men’s manufactories were a disaster not just from a labor standpoint but also from a management one. Inspectors struggled to effectively manage the prison manufactories. Unable to sell nails made in the prison, they offered them at a discount to the public; unable to sell linen, they turned to a local warehouse, and then years later to auctions. They expanded store space in the front of the prison to better exhibit the available goods in hopes of increasing sales.¹⁸² Sometimes they overestimated the demand or realized that goods produced by prisoners did not have as high a value on the open market as anticipated.¹⁸³ Some charged that prison manufactories undermined the free market.¹⁸⁴ As early as 1798, Inspectors realized the institution was deeply in debt from the “extensive credit” that was extended toward the prison manufactories.¹⁸⁵ After years of struggling to make the manufactories profitable, Inspectors decided the prison would stop purchasing raw materials for the prisoners to craft into goods for sale. They closed down the store where goods produced in the prison had been sold for years. Inspectors reported that it was better to have convicts work “for individuals who furnish the materials,” saving them the trouble of purchasing supplies and assuming debt.¹⁸⁶ The prison thus resorted to contracting out the prisoners’ labor to the highest bidder.¹⁸⁷ As a result, the convicts worked for “customers” who paid a set price to the keeper for labor while providing the convicts with the necessary materials.¹⁸⁸

These failing manufactories quickly inspired vocal criticism from those who felt that the primary purpose of the penitentiary—moral reform—was being subjugated to profit. In 1812, Judge Jacob Rush, brother of Dr. Benjamin Rush, claimed that the practice of making “money out of the bodies of convicts” could actually “destroy their souls.”¹⁸⁹ Judge Rush condemned the way that labor came to dominate the institution at the expense of other concerns, calling the law a “public fraud” that claimed to reform criminals while instead nurturing them in a “school for vice.” Roberts Vaux later echoed the argument that attention to profit over punishment led to doom. Vaux scoffed, “The grand object was not so much the punishment and reform of the criminals, as a pecuniary balance, at the year’s end” as if financial concerns were beneath moral ones.¹⁹⁰ In 1821, even the Inspectors themselves admitted the failure of their prison manufactory because it both lost money and failed to reform inmates.¹⁹¹ The failure of manufacturing was one thing, but the failure of punishment was not an option. During these hard times, reformers and Inspectors looked to the women’s side of the prison for inspiration.

Women served as a crucial site of optimism and hope for Inspectors, reformers, and jailers during a challenging, unstable period for two reasons: they seemed to work more dutifully than the men, and they more easily adopted a submissive disposition. Even when women rebelled against orders, men in charge did not take these challenges to their authority seriously. Rather, when women did not work to their full potential or challenged their authority, keepers responded to them very differently than they did to the men. Reform was nothing if not gendered, and it demanded different things of men and women in prison. For instance, on occasions that women were not working to their potential, reformers generally made excuses for them. In their January 1799 report, Inspectors noted “many idle” women convicts and described women vagrants and prisoners for trial as “many idle some dirty and some ragged.”¹⁹² They did not blame the women for their behavior, however, noting instead that they were “unable to procure a sufficient number of spinning wheels to employ all the women,” particularly since many of the wheels were destroyed in a fire started by the men. When women did not work efficiently or dutifully, the Inspectors generally had an excuse for it.

Women who resisted the orders were easily handled by skilled guards who knew how to manipulate and cultivate submission from them. One woman, “an old offender” who tried to burn the prison down in the early 1790s, was described as “ungovernable” and “of an extreme bad character.” But she was no match for a keeper who knew how to handle her emotions and cultivate her submission. Inspector Caleb Lownes recalled that once she realized the keeper “was easy” and did not provoke her “to keep up her passions” she was left with no reason to resent him and thereby “at length submitted.”¹⁹³ Submission was the necessary state for this particular woman—or any woman—to achieve. This woman not only obeyed all the rules of the house after this incident, but promised that she would “perform two days work, each day” for the duration of her stay. Hard work and appropriate submissiveness were expected from women in prison.

There are several explanations for such dramatically different responses to men and women’s idleness. Women were viewed as easily reformable because they worked hard and demonstrated the expected deference to male authority figures most of the time.¹⁹⁴ By demanding deference and submission of the female convicts—two traits central to women’s proper role in society—reformers ensured women would have a greater likelihood of reformation than the men. Inspectors had less to prove in overseeing the women. Female prisoners were trained to assume their proper roles in the heterosexual political economy: as domestic caretakers, economic dependents, and subordinate followers of men. Inspectors did not aspire to make independent, self-sustaining productive citizens of women in prison. There was no path to citizenship for women inside the prison—and few options for them once outside it.

Enslaved and bound women of African descent who challenged the authority of white men and women who claimed possession of them were also no match for the disciplinary regime of the prison. While many references to women in prison avoid mention of race or ethnicity, one visitor made special note of how easily black women received and submitted to the authority of the white keepers. Robert Turnbull, a young lawyer visiting from South Carolina, toured the prison and wrote extensively of his experience. His essay was widely read both domestically and in Europe and powerfully demonstrates the insidious correlation between enslavement and imprisonment in dictating the power relationship between white men and black women.¹⁹⁵ Representations of black women having positive experiences in prison advanced liberal ideals of individual advancement in the face of massive structural obstacles. When visiting the women’s ward, Turnbull was most fascinated by “a young negress” who requested a discharge, though having served less than half her two-year sentence. He reported that her conduct “had been regularly pleasing” and her work ethic admirable. Although her request was rejected, Turnbull was impressed with how she received the bad news, writing, “She declared herself satisfied with his reasoning, and resumed her employment at the spinning-wheel with cheerfulness and activity.”¹⁹⁶ Thus black women prisoners served a critical political and discursive function as emblems of model inmates. Turnbull characterized imprisonment as a positive force in the lives of black women that strengthened the ideological legitimacy of institutional punishment.¹⁹⁷ Black women in particular were used to advance the idea that punishment promised to be a positive force in their lives, just as racist justifications of slavery portrayed the enslaved as happy and taking pleasure in their work in service to their master. Each time a reformer highlighted the successful reform of a black woman in prison, he or she justified the expansion of incarceration.

Accounts of female prisoners—African American, European immigrants, and a few Anglo- and Irish Americans—embracing their captors were vital in reassuring reformers and Inspectors of their own benevolence. Turnbull described a vivid scene of heartfelt reunion between women prisoners and a keeper who had been away. He wrote, “With the most heartfelt expressions of joy, they hastened from their seats to welcome him on his return, and on his part, he received them with a mixed sense of tenderness and satisfaction.”¹⁹⁸ This was celebrated as evidence that characteristics of sentimentality were adopted in the prison itself, enabling the keeper to serve as “a protector—an instructor—not an ironhearted overseer!” This language of benevolent paternalism aimed to obscure the violence of punishment and distinguish it from slavery. These expansive feelings shared by inmates and keepers characterized a soft, warm, and comfortable paternalism expected of the family, not the state. Women prisoners were to be reformed through their relationships within the prison family, which further bolstered the heterosexual political economy.

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Women’s labor was deemed a great success because women dutifully complied with their work orders, thereby demonstrating both the viability and the effectiveness of institutional punishment. This seemed to be the right remedy for those rebellious runaways and others who refused to work and resisted the authority of those who claimed a right to their labor. Forced labor under the watchful eye of a jailer was hardly a change from the conditions under which many women regularly labored, in either slavery or freedom. Men who proved resistant to authority under the wheelbarrow law continued to undermine efforts of the state to discipline them into a productive labor force.

The privilege of presiding over the domestic sphere was increasingly held up as the proper place for women, even as some middling and elite Anglo-American women agitated for women’s education, equality, and political power. While some men might tolerate or even embrace changes demanded by their own wives and daughters, they did not extend this view to the masses, the poor, or the organization of the prison. Rather, penal authority pushed back against all sorts of challenges to the social order. Enslaved, bound, or hired working women would have squeezed domestic work in between other wage-earning duties, but this was not an option in prison. The predominantly Irish and African American women who filled the prison were marked as capable of only the most undervalued forms of work.

The prison was at the forefront of a movement that narrowed the possibilities for women’s work and lives in the American city. Much of the ideological work of labor was unspoken. The sexual division of labor was hardly explained or celebrated, but it was more highly prized than profit. The strict adherence to this principle reveals how invested the state was in naturalizing differences and establishing the social category of gender. The great accomplishment of this period was the largely invisible way in which the sexual division of labor became formalized. Only where women were concerned was the totalizing effect of penal labor realized. Women’s labor was not profitable per se, but it was indispensable. This process served to naturalize a feminine gender that was both incapable of skilled work and fundamentally submissive. There was no way out for women. Those who refused to work, spoke out against visitors, or generally misbehaved were deemed incorrigible, fallen, and worse than male criminals. Those who worked quietly, submitting to penal authority and serving as model inmates to observers, were credited with nothing more than being women—if more properly so than when they first arrived.