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CHAPTER 2

Sentimental Families

WHILE THE WAR for Independence from Britain looms large in its impact on late eighteenth-century American politics and culture, older forces, including the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening, inspired a great deal of social transformation as well. The Enlightenment was characterized as “the age of reason,” in which human progress would be measured through advances in science, medicine, technology, culture, and politics. Enlightenment writers from Cesare Beccaria to Montesquieu produced progressive theories of criminal justice that rejected the legacy of European brutality and aimed to put logic, predictability, and fairness at the heart of punishment. In part because of the tremendous importance of these writings, the revolutionary generation relished the opportunity to craft laws fit for democracy. While these ideas inspired many people to question longstanding practices of violent, corporal, and excessive punishment, the Great Awakening compelled large numbers of Protestants to take action to alleviate the suffering of the masses and pursue salvation for themselves. Together, these forces shaped a culture of humanitarian sensibility among elite and middling men and women.

When botanist and future Massachusetts senator Manasseh Cutler visited Philadelphia in 1787, he met with many local luminaries, including Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, and Charles Willson Peale. Cutler stayed at the well-appointed Indian Queen on Third Street between Market and Chestnut, along with several men attending the Constitutional Convention. Cutler’s hosts wined and dined him, canceling other appointments to spend time with him and show off the best of what their city had to offer. Cutler was part of a new generation of men who asserted themselves as leaders in the revolution’s wake.¹ Humanitarian sensibility required that Cutler cultivate an awareness of everything around him. On his walk around the area of the State House and over past Walnut Street Jail, Cutler’s senses were awakened in ways both positive and negative. He described the walk around the State House as being full of “beauty and elegance,” only to have his own experience of “pleasure and amusement” diminished by “one circumstance that must forever be disgusting.” Cutler contrasted the elegance of the prison building with “its unsavory contents.” He seemed appalled that it was impossible for him to escape the sights and sounds of the inmates, complaining, “In short, whatever part of the mall you are in, this cage of unclean birds is constantly in your view and their doleful cries attack your ears.” Cutler was made very uncomfortable by the prisoners’ disruption. He claimed, “Your ears are constantly insulted with their Billingsgate language, or your feelings wounded with their pitiful complaints.” His remarks expose the limits of the sentimental project. Though sensibility required that he intervene in social matters and mitigate the suffering of others, Cutler seemed more rattled by his own discomfort than that of those imprisoned.²

The cultivation of sensibility was a central value for this generation of elite and learned men. They embraced sensibility—“human sensitivity of perception”—as a way to improve themselves and transform society.³ Late eighteenth-century sensibility combined both reason and feeling in what could be an uneasy balancing act.⁴ Men aspired to balance between the embrace of feeling and a fear of the effects of too much feeling in themselves and others. The expansion of penal authority was rooted in this tenuous quest. Early American culture privileged sentiment as a valued individual pursuit. Sensibility had its roots in eighteenth-century England and later “broadened the arena within which humanitarian feeling was encouraged to operate.”⁵ Reformers targeted many different groups with their efforts, including the poor, the enslaved, alcoholics, immigrants, and prisoners.

The legacy of European punishment and popular perceptions of inmates together made prison an implicitly degraded, vile, and hardened place. When public punishment brought the degradation of the prison into the city streets, Pennsylvania’s leading statesmen were moved to action. The sentimental project would face its ultimate test in working with liberty’s prisoners. Far from politically neutral, however, it became a vehicle for the naturalization of sexual differences while imposing white upper- and middle-class family values on predominantly African American and Irish working and poor people. By reaching out to men and women in prison, offering assessments of their progress and assistance in securing pardons from the governor, male reformers could cultivate a refined, controlled, and benevolent masculinity. They stood in contrast to the brash, aggressive, unfeeling keepers and guards who maintained ultimate authority over inmates. They sought to differentiate themselves from men of lower classes who were “hardened” while encouraging gendered notions of work and dependency among those imprisoned.

The sentimental family became an important idea in punishment, as it was in larger social discourses.⁶ Punishment called for imprisonment and total isolation from one’s family. This manipulation of family ties and dependencies was dynamic, contradictory, and violent, though done in the name of enlightenment and progress. Visitation with loved ones was restricted while reformers inserted themselves forcibly into the lives of the imprisoned, asserting their own ideas of proper visitation. When given the chance to articulate their needs and dreams in petitions for pardons, inmates crafted stories of love, loss, and family that were highly gendered and sentimental. Ideals such as virtue that had long been cast outside the reach of immigrants, African Americans, and poor native-born whites were embraced by these very groups as they sought to establish themselves as worthy of respect, pardon, and even citizenship. Women in prison claimed a feminine subjectivity for themselves that was anchored not only in family and motherhood but also in work.

Pardons

Several of Pennsylvania’s delegates to the Constitutional Convention—Benjamin Franklin, James Wilson, Jared Ingersoll, and Thomas Mifflin—would play key roles in redefining and enforcing the penal laws of Pennsylvania. PSAMPP was incorporated in 1787 and became the nation’s leading prison reform organization. Reformers of relatively modest means, including artisans, ministers, and shopkeepers, joined with political leaders, merchants, and local elites in devising a revised system of punishment. White men collaborated across class in doing this work, to some extent. Quaker Caleb Lownes, an ironworker by trade, and shopkeeper John Connelly devised the organizational structure of the Board of Inspectors while elite men including Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush held the spot-light.⁷ One justification of the need for visits by PSAMPP was that keepers were insufficiently feeling and not tending to the basic needs of prisoners. The powerful group of men who came together through PSAMPP had no problem blaming the workingmen employed as jailers and turnkeys for the problems that marked the jail. When Quaker merchant Samuel Rowland Fisher was imprisoned by the British during the war, he had harsh words for the keeper of Philadelphia’s Old Stone Prison. Fisher described Stokeley Hossman as “the most unfeeling Man that I remember to have met with … a rough, hard-hearted Man.”⁸ Fisher criticized the actions of lesser, working-class men using the language of feeling—something Philadelphia’s elite began to do more and more after the war. The jailor who oversaw Walnut Street Jail in the 1780s, Mr. Reynolds, also resisted imposition of politicians and reformers. He ignored the demands of the Supreme Executive Council on a number of issues by refusing to admit ministers to preach and by not releasing pardoned prisoners who still owed fees. Reynolds claimed he took orders only from the sheriff—not from the state’s governing body and certainly not from a group of self-righteous humanitarians.⁹ For many years, Reynolds did a job no one wanted, for very little pay. He resented the half-hearted meddling and micromanagement offered by his betters. But right or wrong, they would ultimately prevail. Reynolds was accused of exploiting the broken system to the detriment of inmates for his own wealth, extorting extra fees for luxuries such as alcohol. By most official counts, he was corrupt and eventually removed from his position.

Inspectors wanted a keeper who embraced their ideas and gave up the penal ways of old. Reynold’s replacement, Elijah Weed, was popular among Inspectors because he supported their efforts. The keeper, long an officer charged with being tough and hard in superintendence of criminals, was now expected to embrace an authority anchored in sensibility and feeling. This partly explains why upon his death, Mary Weed, Elijah’s wife, was appointed to his position for a brief period despite the widespread disapproval of women’s involvement in prison work at that time.¹⁰ One visitor claimed, “The office of gaoler cannot be repugnant to the feelings of a well-inclined individual.”¹¹ And so Inspectors felt it was a vital part of their job to instate a man of feeling at the top. One thing was clear to them: while a feeling man might become more feeling, and a hardened man might become more hardened, the two did not switch places. Even with a new keeper in place, they visited regularly.

Male reformers who served on the Visiting Committee of PSAMPP visited the prison weekly. While their official mission was to “alleviate the miseries” of the prison, the visits fulfilled other needs as well. Miseries were defined in terms of lack and excess: lack of clothing, bedding, food, and medical care along with too much freedom of movement, interaction with outsiders, and access to alcohol. Most obviously, the visits provided crucial emotional experiences for the men that enhanced their ability to feel sympathy and compassion for others. Progressive elite men believed that reform work gave them the opportunity to demonstrate sensitivity, generosity, and humanitarianism—in addition to cultivating their own sensibility.¹² Benjamin Rush shared this sentiment in a letter to fellow reformer John Coakley Lettsom, “I have the pleasure of informing you that, from the influence of our Prison Society, a reformation has lately taken place in the jail of this city in favor not only of humanity but of virtue in general.” Proud of the impact of their work on others and themselves, Rush declared, “One thing is certain, that if no alleviation is given by them to human misery, men grow good by attempting it.”¹³ This emergence of feeling in the nineteenth century was vital. As Jan Lewis has argued, “To show feeling was to prove oneself fully alive.” But excessive compassion could be destructive. Reformers embraced opportunities to learn about the hardship of others but resisted getting drawn in too closely to others’ pain.¹⁴

The pardon became an important site of humanitarian intervention for this generation of reformers beginning in 1787. From this moment onward, men representing benevolent organizations would visit the prison and report their assessment of physically suffering individuals. They received petitions from prisoners begging for release and would determine whether or not they were worthy of recommendation to the governor for pardon. The system actually provided countless opportunities for strange men with authority granted by the governor to meddle in the lives of inmates—both men and women, predominantly poor. They would identify those individuals whom they deemed worthy of better care, support, or release. They would make formal recommendations to the governor or Supreme Executive Council and informal offerings of blankets, clothing, food, and prayers.¹⁵ The creation and expansion of institutionalized authority were accompanied by an increase in individual attention for specific prisoners from interested reformers who might mediate between them and the increasingly anonymous state. The organization’s impact was extraordinary. Shortly after its creation, PSAMPP was flooded with petitions from prisoners. Most petitions represented individual prisoners, although occasionally groups authored them as well. Prisoners pleaded with courts, reformers, and even the Supreme Executive Council of the state concerning a wide range of issues, from their inability to pay fines to their treatment at the hands of jailers. Individuals begged for forgiveness of court-imposed fines or prison fees that all too often were the only thing standing between them and freedom.

Men and women in prison articulated their needs in slightly different ways. By its very nature, the petition required recognition of one’s dependency and helplessness. For women, the genre was fitting—at least in theory. Just as gender norms requiring female dependency may have made it easy for reformers to assist female inmates, those same roles may have made it harder for women in prison—disproportionately impoverished—to pass the “character” tests rooted in social norms that were also raced and classed. PSAMPP concluded, for example, that Catherine Haas did not deserve their intervention because she was “of a bad character and since last visit was convicted and sentenced to hard labour in the work house.”¹⁶ For women, “bad character” was a catchall phrase for a wide range of behaviors, including cursing, prostitution, simple vagrancy, drunkenness, petty theft, or not showing proper deference to authorities. For men, an expression of submission might garner praise from reformers while undermining the men’s claim to citizenship in the new republic. The core qualities of the liberal subject—individual agency, accountability, and responsibility—were beyond the reach of men in prison, who were forced to beg their betters for help.¹⁷ The petitions served as highly gendered narratives of dependency.¹⁸ This vulnerable class of people negotiated dominant expectations regarding family life and gender roles while seeking the assistance of the reformers.

Progressive reformers did not have to look far for evidence of the harsh cruelty of the state, or of their own benevolence. Prisoner Elizabeth Donovan begged the reformers to rescue her from the “hard-hearted” keeper by “throwing” herself on their “bounty and goodness.”¹⁹ Elizabeth appealed to them through the lens of their growing philosophical commitment to a humanitarian sensibility that had been until recently a feminine pursuit. Donovan’s insistence that the reformers were the kind of virtuous gentlemen who could override the authority of the state (embodied by the wicked keeper) fueled their understanding of reform’s mission and affirmed their own sense of benevolence. Petitions further served to defend and justify penal authority in the first place. Prisoners did not call on revolutionary principles of justice or liberty or democracy in requesting assistance. Rather, they appealed to the reformer’s individual humanity, mercy, kindness, or charity.

Female inmates had to navigate dominant views of motherhood in their appeals. Susey Mines’ petition was filled with references to her family, although not the kind reformers would want to hear; a republican mother she was not. Mines blamed her daughter for her imprisonment and claimed she had no idea her daughter was stealing and then storing the items at her home. Mines wrote that she “would not permit her daughter or her goods inside of her doors” if she knew her daughter was a thief. Mines’s situation was not unusual, as many women were charged with possessing, receiving, or selling stolen goods rather than with actual theft. Once in prison, Mines wrote of her suffering in an exceptionally descriptive way, a practice more common among female than male petitioners. Mines emphasized the survival of her family and based her request for assistance on their needs. She stated that she had “a family [of] small distress[ed] children [to] provide for which are now in a most suffering condition and starved and cold winter just approaching,” and appealed to the “merciful kindness and humanity” of the reformers to help her and prevent her and her family “from perishing this winter.” Like other women who raised the needs of their family in petitions, this mother named children but never mentioned a husband.²⁰

The number of references to women who appeared to be sole providers for themselves and their families is striking. Sarah Collier cited the distress of her children as the primary basis for her appeal and explicitly referenced their dependence on her. Speaking of herself in the third person, Collier wrote, “She humbly hopes that your honour will grant her liberation as her confinement will only serve to increase her distress as her children are almost helpless and chiefly depending on their parent[’s] industry.”²¹ Women believed that motherhood was the right chord to strike with male reformers who held the key to their freedom. The concept of republican motherhood was already circulating, carving out an important role for women’s domestic leadership in shaping the polity. Women like Collier risked judgment of failure about their parenting skills and life choices, but they still believed drawing attention to their role as mothers was their best hope in convincing their visitors to recommend them for a pardon.

Elizabeth Elliot wrote to the Supreme Executive Council of the state requesting remission of fines for her conviction for selling liquor without a license. Elliot did not claim innocence but begged remission from the ten-pound fine. She probably supported herself and her family through her tippling house. Though she did not present the suffering of her children as the basis for her request, she did end her appeal by stating, “Your unfortunate petitioner is a poor widow who hath a family of five small children.”²² In cases such as Elizabeth’s, it was clear that she did not have a husband. The absence of references to male providers signals several things. One, women without the economic support or political authority of men were more likely to be imprisoned. Two, female petitioners were more successful in appealing to the sympathies of reformers if they presented themselves as single women with children. In the absence of a named husband, progressive men would assert their own patriarchal benevolence, offering financial or legal relief to women who were failed by other men.

Petitioners exhibited varying degrees of deference, with women’s petitions generally more excessive in their demonstrations of both suffering and submission. In November 1787, prisoner Catharine Usoons sent a letter to John Morrison, a coppersmith and charter member of PSAMPP. Her petition deployed themes that would resonate with her male audience by deferring to Morrison, emphasizing her own vulnerability and dependency, and highlighting her role as a mother. She pleaded, “To your honour the dismal and deplorable situation I now labour under with my young infant at my breast, have not any cloaths to put on and am almost starved … I hope your honour will take it into your charitable consideration as it will never lay in my power to pay the restitution lay’d on me wile I lay in Jail and I have been here 18 months and suffer’d inconsiderable, and I am afraid myself and child will starve this winter without your honour.”²³ Catharine’s appeal offered PSAMPP members a range of ways to help her. Short of actually paying the fees for her release, PSAMPP could see to it that she received some clothing—at least the standard shift—and adequate food. Written expressions of submission by women reinforced their appropriate position vis-à-vis men and served as evidence of their successful reformation. By demanding deference and submission from 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. The rhetorical submission of the petition only further enforced this.

Male petitioners had a host of different issues to navigate. Manliness was measured by independence for men in the early republic. The working poor, servants, slaves, and imprisoned men strove for expressions of independence in place of actual financial independence.²⁴ Male prisoners were eager to reassert themselves as providers for their families, and this idea often shaped the basis and tone of their petitions. They were not looking for handouts but merely the opportunity—both noble and appropriate-to support their wives and children. James Parkins wrote, “Your well known sensibility and the goodness of your heart I flatter myself will be an advocate for a whole family and by your benevolence and kind influence I anxiously wish that a drooping family may once more smile and thank their generous benefactors.”²⁵ Parkins made his case based on the collective needs of his family rather than his individual desires. Other men wrote explicitly about the particular family members who depended on them. Alexander Drian’s petition to the Supreme Executive Council cited the needs of his two-year-old child and wife in critical condition as grounds for leniency and a remission of his fine.²⁶ John McCrum begged to be released so that he could “go work honestly for my bread and my wife as I always did before,” adding that he would rather be dead than to see his “wife suffer as she does.”²⁷ Prisoners worried about their families and believed that the well-being of innocent women and children would inspire the benevolent reformers to help them. This turned out to be true in many cases. For example, the Visiting Committee of PSAMPP advocated the payment of the dollar fine that kept prisoner William Ketsel from being with and supporting his “wife and three children.”²⁸ The idea that men deserved the opportunity for success because their families were dependent on them only became stronger in Philadelphia during this period, as wage labor replaced long-standing terms of servitude or slavery for society’s most vulnerable.

Gendered notions of economic self-sufficiency and independence were less forgiving of men who needed assistance.²⁹ This is precisely why male prisoners framed their requests in more expansive terms. Jacob James could not make the complete bail he was offered and ended up in jail awaiting trial—a common cause of people’s imprisonment. James basically requested a loan from PSAMPP for his bail money and promised to pay the debt back weekly until it was discharged. This was an unusual and creative request. He rooted his appeal, however, in the needs of his family and his desire to take care of them. James wrote, “Hon[ore]d Sir I have a wife and one child in grate distress on the account of my being in this place and can not be any help to them.”³⁰ James entered a dependent relationship with his benefactors based on his desire for freedom. He (and others like him) staked a claim to independence (and therefore manliness) by asserting his relationship to his dependents.³¹

Patrick Kain claimed to have unknowingly harbored two escaped convicts and ended up in prison as a result. Kain offered several reasons why PSAMPP should assist him, none as powerfully or dramatically stated as his need to provide for his family. Obviously distraught, he proclaimed, “I have a wife and three small children and have myself lost a leg in the service of the country and have sailed since 7 voyages with Capt. Cunningham and if I am detained here and loose the chance of a berth god knows what will become of my wife and children.”³² Men never cited their children alone as those in need of their aid, suggesting they were never expected to be the primary or sole caretakers of children. Men could be providers for families, not caretakers of children. Thus, they referred to their wives and families, in marked contrast to women, who often described themselves as the sole custodians of children.

Despite hints of things to come, including a decrease in use of the language of deference and an increase in the use of petitions for collective political action, the petitions written by prisoners in Walnut Street Jail from 1787 to 1789 are more reflective of the petition’s past than of its future. Even the more assertive and entitled petitions penned by debtors would not have raised the ire of reformers. They were still petitions, after all, a genre of communication that “acknowledged the power of the rulers and the dependence of the aggrieved.”³³ Prisoners were nothing if not dependent—and reformers were happy to oblige requests that did not threaten this hierarchy. Still, imprisoned men were placed in an impossible position: they had to practice deference and obedience while demonstrating the markers of citizenship—independence, agency, and strength. The petition only further highlighted this tension, which can be seen in attempts by some men to assert themselves more boldly. Men used the petition in multiple ways, attempting to navigate the paradoxical relationship between submission and self-determination. They did this most persuasively not by rooting their arguments in claims of independence, liberty, democracy, or citizenship, but rather through their own relations of dependency—by framing themselves as providers and caretakers for wives and children.

Prisoners of both sexes wrote desperately, longingly, and mournfully about the plight of their families during their imprisonment. Their only hope was to appeal to the whims, sensibilities, or conscience of those men who positioned themselves as arbiters of justice and suffering. PSAMPP members received significant public recognition for their work. One commentator downplayed the fact that most were economically successfully and politically powerful, stating, “Nothing further need be said, respecting the members who come to their relief, but that they are men, engaged in the noblest office that can employ human nature, that of mitigating the miseries of their fellow creatures.”³⁴ But it was precisely their status that empowered them to advocate the creation of the penitentiary and then to mediate the intimate family relationships of those trapped inside.³⁵ Gendered representations of desire and dependency helped stabilize the heterosexual political economy by assuring reformers that men and women in prison understood and aspired to social and economic roles rooted in sexual difference.³⁶

* * *

Reformers embraced their role in recommending pardons partly because this process deflected attention from the expansion of punishment and its brutal consequences for immigrants and African Americans. Individual pardons provided a counter to concerns that the penal system was a substitute for slavery, an extension of the slave labor economy, or a tool to contain the poor masses. The opportunity to pardon strengthened the belief of benevolent reformers and abolitionists alike that human consideration—and even justice—might be possible for African Americans, immigrants, women, and all of those with no formal say in legal matters. Widespread use of the pardon in the first decade of the penitentiary reflects both optimism and pragmatism. PSAMPP’s first recommendation for pardon was for a black man convicted of arson. In 1787, Barrack Martin along with his wife, Tamar, were charged with arson. It was decided that there was no case against her (ignoramus), but he was convicted of arson and sentenced to death in 1787.³⁷ Martin was said to “voluntarily and maliciously, on the 28th Feb. 1787, set[ting] fire to and burn[ing], in the township of Lower Dublin, one barn, one stable, and one out house, the property of a certain Susannah Morris, containing 10,000 lbs weight of hay.”³⁸ The Supreme Executive Council ordered a pardon for Martin shortly after his conviction. PSAMPP members discovered that despite this order, he was still being held in prison in irons. They recommended him “to the care of the Acting Committee” on May 31, 1787. Two weeks later, the Acting Committee reported that his irons were removed, and they soon received verification of his pardon and noted the council was “ready for his liberation.”³⁹ Martin’s pardon was inspired by the early zeal of humanitarian reformers.

And so the pardons flowed. Reformers and Inspectors would visit prisoners and make recommendations to the governor. Reform proponents argued that pardons were essential to the penitentiary system because they gave jailers and reformers a way to entice convicts to good behavior. Pardons were also “freely granted to make room for new-comers.”⁴⁰ In 1795 and 1799, roughly half of the women sentenced received early releases. Pardons were more frequent and of greater length (about four months) during 1795 than in 1799, when the average dropped to one month. But politicians and reformers continued to clash over the use of pardons. Many Pennsylvania judges and politicians were convinced that certainty and proportionality of punishment were key to the system’s success. This idea was central to Cesare Beccaria’s theory of punishment, which had inspired an earlier generation of reformers. Judge Jacob Rush argued that pardons should never be granted in response to convict pleas of sorrow, guilt, or regret. Granting pardon to those who repented would “give license to men to break laws as they pleased,” while rendering the penal system and government weak, vulnerable, and ineffective.⁴¹ This view was widely adopted, as the percentage of pardons dropped dramatically in the early years of the nineteenth century. By 1807, only 11 percent of prisoners received pardons.

Debates over pardons never subsided. Occasionally they were granted on humanitarian grounds, such as the pregnancy of a woman, but otherwise were typically linked to evidence of reformation. The criteria for pardons were as follows: “The convicts who demean themselves best, and are most submissive to the rules and orders of the jail, are rewarded by a recommendation to the governor.”⁴² In 1820, Governor William Findlay refused to accept the Board’s recommendations and demanded more information in response to critics who claimed he pardoned too freely and was responsible for freeing a violent man.⁴³ President of the Board of Inspectors Thomas Bradford, Jr., begged for the reinstatement of the pardon and continued to advocate the use of pardons as a tool of reform. As he explained in a letter to the governor, pardons were a key to making prisoners more orderly and hardworking: “The stimulus to industry and obedience was hope and hence pardons were frequent…. Hope of reward and fear of punishment in the cells were the powerful and efficient agents in maintaining the admirable discipline which then existed in the prisons.”⁴⁴ Successive governors rejected the plea. Fewer than 6 percent of the women convicted in 1823 received such pardons.⁴⁵ By 1830, the Board of Inspectors was begging the governor—then George Wolf—to reinstate the use of pardons on their recommendation. They devised a three-part classification system for determining an individual’s worthiness of pardon. The governor believed that too liberal a policy would disturb the peace of society and that the public deserved to know why a prisoner was pardoned.

Others felt racial and gender norms still figured largely into pardons and that the governor used his own subjective means to grant them. Both were true. Women could also earn a pardon by promising to resume dependency on their parents. Evidence of family ties could prove crucial in justifying a pardon and early release from prison. Artimissa Gardner was sentenced to three months in prison for running a disorderly house. She swore to visiting reformers not only that she was anxious “to pursue a virtuous course of life” but also that she wanted to return to her mother who lived near New York. PSAMPP inquired about the legitimacy of her claim, her own word not being enough, but the prospect of this outcome was always thought preferable to releasing a woman back to the streets.⁴⁶ After Ann Setzimmous was imprisoned on charges of stealing fifty dollars from one person and something else from another, Inspectors had her released on the condition that she go home and live with her parents in the country.⁴⁷ Young women resuming dependency on family were pardoned while older black men languished in prison. A group visiting Walnut Street Prison in 1827 commented on several older men of color who were unjustly held. The visitors hinted at a racist jury system that was only compounded by a pardoning system corrupted by money and connections.⁴⁸

Isolation from Family

In its founding constitution, PSAMPP invoked the unification of the family of mankind as a central goal of their efforts, stating “By the aids of humanity, their undue and illegal sufferings may be prevented; the links, which should bind the whole family of mankind together under all circumstances, be preserved unbroken.”⁴⁹ It was widely agreed by men of state and reform that a breakdown in domestic authority led to crime and mischief in the first place. Patriarchal authority had many faces and forms.⁵⁰ Male heads of household, benevolent social reformers, and agents of the state would all exert control over the lives of poor women and men in different ways.⁵¹ When intimate patriarchy failed, they were happy to step in. Denied the opportunity to live with and labor on behalf of their own families, prisoners were forced to work as servants in a different house—the penitentiary.⁵² This grave violation of the family occurred simultaneously with the production of the nuclear family as “the family” in broader circles.⁵³ Rather than being taught how to cultivate social relationships and familial relationships with their own kin, prisoners were forced to live in a distorted prison family organized around an overly simplified heterosexual political economy. Punishment stood against marriage and family, suggesting that the path of reformative incarceration was never really meant to lead to citizenship at all.

Penal authority was a double-edged sword when it came to women and marriage. On the one hand, unmarried women were disproportionately punished. On the other hand, penal authority also worked against the marriages of prisoners. The introduction of the penitentiary as the premier punishment actually undermined marriage. Women were cut off from the familial sphere and subject to an ever-expansive institutional patriarchy disguised by the rubric of humanitarian sensibility.⁵⁴ This violation of the family by progressive elites in the name of humanitarian reform shows what little regard they had for the family ties of the immigrant and African American poor who filled the jails. The denial of family life for prisoners further distinguished them from the middling and elite whites who embraced marriage as a foundational relationship for the nation. Divorced from the central social relationship rooted in sexual difference—marriage—prisoners were both literally and ideologically blocked from participating in citizenship.

When Rush laid out his critique of public punishment, he also outlined his vision for what should take its place: imprisonment and complete separation from one’s family and community. His logic was that because liberty was so valued, imprisonment would be greatly feared. Rush wrote, “Personal liberty is so dear to all men, that the loss of it, for an indefinite time, is a punishment so severe, that death has often been preferred to it.” He envisioned complete removal from society to a remote location engineered to be difficult to reach and ominous to behold. Rush stated, “Let the avenue to the house be rendered difficult and gloomy by mountains or morasses.”⁵⁵ For such a forward thinking man of the Scottish Enlightenment, this description sounds oddly medieval, reminiscent of the kind of dungeons and castles that were scattered across Europe. It was also the opposite of new ideas in circulation about the sublime effects of nature and natural beauty on the mind and soul.⁵⁶

Popular depictions of the pain inflicted on families by punishment feature heterosexual couples shattered by the imprisonment of the husband. A 1796 poem portrayed the experience of imprisonment through the eyes of the woman left behind: “Say, does a wife, to want consign’d, / While weeping babes surround her bed, / Peep through, and see the fetters bind / Those hands, that earn’d their daily bread?”⁵⁷ The poem centers on a nuclear family thrown into a state of sadness and want at the loss of their provider. Other portrayals focused less on finances and more on love. One poem captures the intense severity of isolation for a man denied his love. This prisoner exclaims, “My days were dull, my nights were long! My evening dreams, My morning schemes Were how to break that cruel chain, And, Jenny, be with you again.”⁵⁸ The message in these stories was loud and clear: prison destroyed families. Prison inspired sadness, longing, worry, frustration, loneliness, anger, boredom, guilt, and poverty. These depictions celebrated families that were destroyed by the imprisonment of a man. But rather than lying around crying, as popular anecdotes portrayed, women had to take care of business. When her husband was imprisoned, Abigail McAlpines reported “[I] work in att my [ne]dedel which I hope will maintain me and my little girl decently,” not only during his imprisonment but even after his release when he went off to sea to earn some money for the family.⁵⁹ The reality of family economies, particularly for those of the lower sort who disproportionately filled Philadelphia’s prison, was always more complex than the situation idealized by the reform agenda.

Punishment defined by Rush centered on the manipulation of the emotions of prisoners while protecting the emotions of innocent citizens. Imprisonment would impose a range of overwhelming feelings of loss, loneliness, sadness, and remorse on the guilty. Inmates would be forced to submit to the authority of the state, which had total control over their release. The imagined future reunion with loved ones—anticipation, relief, and joy—was just as important to Rush as the temporary exile from family and society. Rush explained, “By preserving this passion alive, we furnish a principle, which, in time, may become an overmatch for those vicious habits, which separated criminals from their friends, and from society.”⁶⁰ This desire for reunion gets stronger with age, burning inside the prisoner, and driving him or her to want to change. Rush wrote, “I already hear the inhabitants of our villages and townships counting the years that shall complete the reformation of one of their citizens.”⁶¹ He argued against banishment on the grounds that permanent exile destroyed the motivation of reunion with one’s family.

Rush sought to make the case that prison was a more severe punishment than either public labor or death. He argued that imprisonment was the most severe punishment precisely because it forced separation from family. Rush wrote, “An attachment to kindred and society is one of the strongest feelings in the human heart. A separation from them, therefore, has ever been considered as one of the severest punishments that can be inflicted upon man.”⁶² Rush’s proposal for this approach to punishment echoed sentiments expressed in an abolitionist essay about the problem of slavery: “When we consider the cruel invasion of every right of humanity, in forcing the unhappy Africans from their native land, and all those tender connections which rational beings hold dear.”⁶³ Though Rush and his contemporaries would deny that their prized institution reproduced that one increasingly reviled, the parallels between enslavement and imprisonment are obvious.

Cutting people off from family and friends may have seemed an ingenious punishment to Rush and his contemporaries, but for African Americans both free and enslaved, it had a deep, dark, historic resonance. Ripping people from home, family networks, and loved ones was a routine practice of enslavement.⁶⁴ The violence of such destruction and isolation was justified under an economic system that privileged slaveholder profits and whims over the kinship networks, family, and emotional needs of African Americans.⁶⁵ As the institution of slavery was gradually eroding in the North, the institution of the penitentiary was being devised and rapidly expanded. Just ten years after passage of the Gradual Abolition Act paved the way for the end of slavery, the state of Pennsylvania enacted a revised penal law that allowed for containment not only of African Americans, but also of immigrants and the poor. Along with freedom came a new legal and social apparatus to deny freedom.⁶⁶ Such seeming contradictions were ubiquitous. For example, Rush himself joined the antislavery society while remaining in possession of his own slave for many years.⁶⁷ Rush, like so many other elites, justified this with the belief that blacks did not value freedom as much as whites. Only then could the connection between slavery and punishment be an afterthought. Prison was an ideal punishment if one presumed that liberty was “a good that belongs to all in the same way.”⁶⁸ Ideologies of racism and liberalism became intertwined, enabling the expansion of an institution rooted in slavery during the era of slavery’s abolition.⁶⁹

Forced labor was also a familiar economic and social relationship for the many presently and formerly indentured servants who populated the prison in large numbers. By sentencing convicts to “servitude,” the state reappropriated a classification long used to describe desperately poor people who were isolated from their own families while working in the homes of others, often under contract.⁷⁰ While servants labored under an economic debt determined by the terms of their indenture, prisoners labored under a social one that placed an individual’s obligation to the state ahead of his or her obligation to their family.⁷¹ Rush did not comment on how closely his proposed scheme for punishment resembled slavery or indentured servitude. No one did. But while indentured servitude was becoming irrelevant due to changing economic realities, debates over slavery raged nationally.

At least one person thought separating people from their families was too harsh a punishment. On his visit to Philadelphia, abolitionist Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville detailed the pain of this separation: “By imprisonment, you snatch a man from his wife, his children, his friends; you deprive him of their succor and consolation; you plunge him into grief and mortification; you cut him off from all those connections which render his existence of any importance.”⁷² But for Rush, this pain was necessary to compel the personal transformation he hoped punishment would effect. Only then would the power of the family reunion be realized. Rush wrote of the hypothetical inmate’s family, “I behold them running to meet him on the day of his deliverance.—His friends and family bathe his cheeks with tears of joy; and the universal shout of the neighborhood is, ‘This our brother was lost and is found—was dead, and is alive.’ ”⁷³ Themes of sin, atonement, and redemption reminiscent of the parable of the prodigal son resonate in Rush’s plan. For Rush, each inmate had the potential to be a prodigal son, able to see the error of his ways, repent, and be reborn under the right conditions. Rush’s brother, Judge Jacob Rush, concurred. For both Rush brothers, suffering was a crucial component of punishment. Judge Jacob Rush argued, “The voice of nature has uniformly demanded sufferings as the proper atonement of guilt, and that sorrow alone is not a sufficient expiation.”⁷⁴ Only through suffering and repentance could one find salvation—and be worthy of readmittance to the polity.⁷⁵

Because family was both so prized and so perilous, family would be denied those who violated the law. Family ties were already stretched for everyone by years of extended separations caused by war, politics, and economic necessity.⁷⁶ The actual consequence of imprisonment for most families was financial peril. Laboring families required income from all their members, including adult men and women as well as older children. The imprisonment of either a man or a woman would result in a lost source of income for the family. If a prisoner was the single or primary earner in his or her family, this would be devastating. The famous bigamist, kidnapper, and counterfeiter Ann Carson described herself as the primary earner in her family, and the chaos her imprisonment triggered. She reported, “My family were, by my confinement, thrown into a state bordering on distraction; ever accustomed to have me at the head of both business and household, they knew not how to proceed without my presence.”⁷⁷ Carson was one of many who served as the anchor of both home and work for a family. No one disputes the fact that Carson was a successful businesswoman who ran a small shop dealing in fine china and other imports. She was one of a sizable number of women in Philadelphia who managed their own businesses and asserted their economic independence in the process. Women like Carson exhibited a great degree of innovation, autonomy, and success while navigating the economic and social constraints of the city. Her family’s hardship was a real and tangible consequence of her imprisonment.

Carson was not exactly a typical prisoner—her crimes were more serious, diverse, and publicized than those of most women. She probably earned more money as well. But she was part of a large group of women whose personal and family economies were thrown into chaos by imprisonment. Women imprisoned without trial for minor social transgressions under the vagrancy act faced incredible challenges.⁷⁸ Who would run Elizabeth Ferguson’s beerhouse while she sat in prison for thirty-six hours on charges of intoxication? How much income did Mary Williams lose when she was held with five other women on charges of running a disorderly house? Did Mary Brown, a free black widow who labored as a washerwoman, lose clients when she was locked up for socializing with friends and deemed a “riotous” disturber of the peace?⁷⁹ Constables, night watchmen, clerks, and judges did not trouble themselves with these questions—though they freely complained of the consequences when women were unable to support themselves.

Imprisonment could destroy a woman’s ability to earn money, keep a job, and raise her children. Institutional policies regarding children ranged from indifference to strict superintendence. Either could be devastating to mother, child, and their relationship. Some women moved between the almshouse and the prison, reflecting a cycle of poverty and imprisonment with no clear way out. Other women were devastated to learn that their children were bound out when they were in prison. In colonial times, infants and very young children could accompany their mothers to jail. This practice persisted in the first few decades of the nineteenth century.⁸⁰ Women with very young infants or who actually gave birth in prison were allowed to keep them by their side. In 1787, Catherine Usoons pleaded for some relief from prison or labor or both, in part because she was working “with my young infant at my breast.”⁸¹ The Visiting Committee reported that “some females” furnished “a gift” of clothing for a child recently born in the prison in 1800.⁸² Inspectors John Harrison and John Bacon noted on April 28, 1817, that a prisoner Dobly Miller gave birth to a boy.⁸³ Other women had children of indeterminate ages with them. For example, in 1800, a woman named Ruth Moore, who appealed to the mayor for a discharge, was described by the Visiting Committee as “an Indian Woman with her child.”⁸⁴ In 1804, reformers mentioned prisoner “Ann Keating and her child,” as well as reporting the purchase of two yards of flannel for Mary Gale’s child.⁸⁵ These children were probably infants or very, very young. The fact that women would keep their young children with them in prison was utterly shocking and astounding to reformers who complained about the practice. Writing to the Supreme Executive Council, PSAMPP members noted, “Children both in the goal and workhouse are frequently suffered to remain with their parents whereby they are initiated in early life to scenes of debauchery dishonesty and wickedness of every kind.”⁸⁶ Reformers sought to rid the prison of children for their own protection, despite the fact that many had nowhere to go. A single, divorced, or widowed woman’s children would have been removed to the almshouse or bound to a local family if other relatives were not available to take care of them during their mother’s imprisonment.⁸⁷