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The Generosity of Antebellum Poor Relief

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Joan Underhill Hannon
Joan Underhill Hannon
Affiliation:
The author is Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720.
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Abstract

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Type
Notes and discussion
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , September 1984 , pp. 810 - 821
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1984

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References

2 See Rothman, , The Discovery of the Asylum; James Leiby, A History of Social Welfare and Social Work in the United States (New York, 1978);Google Scholar and Katz, Michael B., Poverty and Policy in American History (New York, 1983).Google Scholar

3 Hannon, Joan Underhill “Poor Relief Policy in Antebellum New York State: The Rise and Decline of the Poorhouse,” Explorations in Economic History (forthcoming, 1984).Google Scholar

4 Changes in the number of recipients may reflect both changes in the poverty rate and changes in the standards used to determine who among the poor qualified for relief. Since the qualification standards were never codified, it is impossible to determine precisely how they might have changed over time.Google Scholar

5 Changes over time in expenditures per recipient reflect both changes in the length of time for which relief was granted and changes in the amount granted to recipients who remained on the relief rolls for a given length of time. Where possible, data on expenditures per recipient will be supplemented by estimates of expenditures per full-year recipient.Google Scholar

6 The benefit-earnings ratio is perhaps the best measure of both the financial burden of relief from the taxpayers' point of view and the generosity of relief from the recipients' point of view. The ratio, as Lebergott suggests, must be high enough to satisfy the public's charitable instincts and/or to maintain social order among the poor but not so high that taxpayers decide they have been working for not enough more than they could collect from the welfare system. Lebergott, Stanley, Wealth and Want (Princeton, 1975), pp. 53–69.Google Scholar

7 The procedure is similar to that used by Lebergott to estimate expenditures per full-year recipient in the United States, 1850–1870, but since Lebergott used as his denominator the number receiving relief on June 1, a date on which the figures should be relatively low, he suggests that his estimates may be biased upward (Wealth and Want, p. 61).Google Scholar

8 To allow for comparison between my estimates and those presented by Lebergott, I have used the same common labor earnings series—the average daily wages of common labor (multiplied by 311 to yield annual earnings) as reported in Lebergott, Stanley, Manpower in Economic Growth (New York, 1964), Table A25.Google Scholar Unfortunately, this wage series extends back only to 1850. Between 1850 and 1860, the Lebergott series parallels exactly the urban unskilled wage index reported in Williamson, Jeffrey G., “American Prices and Urban Inequality Since 1820,” this Journal, 36 (06 1976), 333.Google Scholar I have used Williamson's index to extend Lebergott's series back to 1820. Zabler, Jeffrey, “Further Evidence on American Wage Differentials, 1800–1830,” Explorations in Economic History, 10 (Fall 1972), 113, provides a monthly wage series for unskilled labor in eastern Pennsylvania iron-producing firms, 1800–1830. I have linked Zabler's series to the Williamson Lebergott series on the single overlapping year, 1820, to derive common labor wages for 1800 to 1820.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Lebergott, Wealth and Want, p. 57.Google Scholar

10 Yates, John V., New York Secretary of State, “Report of the Secretary of State in 1824 on the Relief and Settlement of the Poor,” in The Almshouse Experience: Collected Reports (hereafter cited as Yates Report). An appendix containing a full discussion of the Yates Report is available from the author on request.Google Scholar

11 See Hannon, “Poor Relief Policy in Antebellum New York State,” for a discussion of variations across locations in New York's public relief system.Google Scholar

12 See Hannon, Joan Underhill, “Poverty in the Antebellum Northeast: The View From New York State's Poor Relief Rolls,” unpublished ms. (1983), Appendix A.Google Scholar

13 Yates Report, p. 1059.Google Scholar

14 The relatively low figure for New York City may reflect an overcount of the number of outdoor relief recipients. The city recorded the number of families receiving outdoor relief and simply assumed an average of four persons per family to estimate the number of individuals. Yates Report, p. 1010.Google Scholar

15 Yates Report, p. 946.Google Scholar

16 The highest figure for New York City is that shown in Table 2. A weighted average of this figure and the rest-of-state figure shown in Table 3, col. (3), where the weights are the fraction of the state's full-year-equivalent recipients in each location, yields a statewide estimate of expenditures per full-year equivalent of $46.17 (22 percent of common labor earnings).

17 New York Secretary of State, “Annual Reports on Statistics of the Poor,” in New York State Legislature, Assembly Documents: 1836 vol. 2, no. 72; 1837, vol. 3, no. 270; 1838, vol. 6, no. 311; 1839, vol. 3, no. 146; 1840, vol. 8, no. 332; 1841, vol. 7, no. 227; 1842, vol.5, no. 121; 1843, vol.2, no. 38; 1845, vol. 5, no. 197; 1850, vol. 6, no. 169; 1851, vol. 5, no. 147; 1853, vol. 6, no. 120; 1854, vol. 4, no. 144; 1856, vol.5, no. 214; 1858, vol. 1, no. 10; 1859, vol.3, no. 101; 1860, vol.2, no. 71; and Senate Documents: 1844, vol. 2, no. 73; 1847, vol. 3, no. 100; 1848, vol. 3, no. 79; 1849, vol. 3, no. 83; 1855, vol. 3, no. 72; and 1857, vol. 4, no. 131. The Reports are based on annual reports to the secretary of state from the county poor relief officials.Google Scholar

18 Inspection of the data in the published reports revealed a number of inconsistencies in the individual county reports. Though these inconsistencies were recognized and often noted in the Annual Reports on Statistics of the Poor, the secretaries of state made no effort to correct them. In most cases, the problems could be identified and corrected, but in every year there were some counties for which the data either were incomplete or contained obvious but uncorrectable errors. Data for those counties were not used, so the statewide totals reported in the text include only those counties for which all data are complete in each year. The coverage varies from year to year, but even in the worst year, 48 out of the state's 60 counties, representing 80 percent of the state's population, are included. An appendix detailing methods of correcting the data and providing annual data is available from the author on request.Google Scholar

19 See Hannon, “Poor Relief Policy in Antebellum New York State.”Google Scholar

20 For estimates of the average lengths of time for which poorhouse and outdoor relief were granted, see Hannon, “Poverty,” Table 1.Google Scholar

21 Estimated as a weighted average of what New York City's expenditures per recipient would have been under the specified assumption and actual expenditures per recipient in the rest of the state, where the weights are the fractions of total recipients in each location.Google Scholar

22 See New York State Senate Committee to Visit the Charitable and Penal Institutions of the State, “Report,” in New York State Legislature, Senate Documents, 79th Session, vol. 1, no. 8 (Albany, 1856); and Hannon, “Poor Relief.”Google Scholar

23 It should be noted that data from the Annual Reports on Statistics of the Poor imply a lower standard of generosity in the 1850s than Lebergott reports in Wealth and Want. Lebergott (p. 64) shows annual expenditures per full-year recipient in New York State rising from $64 (30.8 percent of common labor earnings) in 1850 to $75 (23.7 percent of common labor earnings) in 1860.Google ScholarLebergott's estimates are derived from the U. S. Census Office, A Compendium of the Ninth Census of the United States, 1872, pp. 533–34, which contains data on the “cost of annual support,” the “number of persons receiving support on June 1,” and the “number of persons supported during the year,” for each state in 1850, 1860, and 1870. The census figures on annual costs and on the number receiving support on June 1 are consistent with the data published in the Annual Reports on Statistics of the Poor, although the latter provides the number in the poorhouse on December I rather than the number receiving support on June I. The Annual Reports, however, give a much larger figure than does the census for the number receiving relief during the year, a discrepancy that is difficult to explain but which Walker in his notes to the census tables suggests might be attributable to a misinterpretation of the census question. Neither Lebergott nor I used this figure to estimate expenditures per full-year recipient or the benefit-earnings ratio, so the discrepancy in the published data cannot explain the large difference between our estimates. Lebergott's estimate of expenditures per full-year recipient is simply annual expenditures divided by the number receiving support on June I. In effect, he uses the number receiving relief on a single day as a proxy for the number of full-year recipients, which he justifies as follows (p. 61): “On a June date the figure would include the hard core of the poor regularly supported by the state.” Lebergott admits (p. 61) that his estimate may be biased upward because expenditures on partial and temporary relief are included in the numerator, whereas few temporary recipients are likely to be included in the June 1 count of recipients used in the denominator.Google ScholarHe concludes that this bias is small. According to the Annual Reports, however, temporary relief accounted for 43 percent of all relief expenditures and almost 73 percent of all recipients in New York in 1850 (see Hannon, “Poor Relief,” Table 5). If, as Lebergott and local evidence suggest, few temporary recipients were likely to be on the rolls in June, the majority of New York's recipients are omitted from Lebergott's denominator, but expenditures on them (over 40 percent of total expenditures) are included in his numerator. Given the available data, there are two ways to avoid this bias. One could subtract temporary relief costs from total relief costs and divide the remainder by the June I count of recipients, yielding an estimate of expenditures per full-year recipient of $36 in 1850. Alternatively, one can accept what local relief officials reported as the cost of supporting a pauper for a year in the poorhouse as I have done in Table 5, yielding an 1850 estimate of $34. The fact that these two procedures yield very similar estimates reinforces my inclination to accept the estimates of contemporary relief officials.Google Scholar

24 Hannon, “Poor Relief Policy.”Google Scholar

25 See Hannon, “Poverty in the Antebellum Northeast.”Google Scholar