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Warming the Poor and Growing Consumers: Fuel Philanthropy in the Early Republic's Urban North
Sean Patrick Adams
| Residents of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia at the turn of the nineteenth century had every reason to be optimistic, as their cities blossomed as centers of commerce, culture, and industry in a young, growing nation. But no matter how rosy the future might appear, the winters of the early republic seemed to get worse and worse. Take the southernmost city of the three, Philadelphia. In the winter of 1805, when snow drifts reached thirty inches high, the price of a cord of oak wood—traditionally defined as a stack four feet high, four feet wide, and eight feet long—shot up to $12. That was more than double the price per cord earlier that year. The city's working poor suffered the most under such conditions. The Philadelphia American Daily Advertiser reported that one family, "having expended all their wood, was under the direful necessity, in order to keep themselves from perishing, to burn their table, washing-tub, and many other articles of household furniture." Many froze to death in their own homes. "Scenes like these proclaim the uncertainty of human possessions & enjoyments & the incapacity of man to protect himself against adversity," the Philadelphia merchant Thomas P. Cope wrote in his diary that winter. "It is during these seasons of suffering that the voice of omnipotence is heard & confessed." During February of 1809 Charles Peirce, an amateur historian of Philadelphia weather, estimated the average temperature at twenty-six degrees Fahrenheit and recorded three consecutive days when the thermometer remained below zero. The poor suffered the brunt of the bitter season as firewood shortages caused the price of fuel to spike yet again. In this most temperate of the major northern cities of the early republic—in which the physician, geologist, and amateur meteorologist James Mease bragged that "our winters are less uniformly cold, and more variable" than those of other cities and that the Delaware River froze solid for only two weeks at a time by 1811—the pinch of cold weather coupled with fuel shortages made urban life more and more difficult in the winter.1 |
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Although anecdotal evidence attests to the worsening winters, it is difficult to measure exactly the scope and magnitude of fuel shortages in the cities of the early republic. By the late eighteenth century, city residents certainly felt the negative impact of urban development on the firewood stocks of surrounding areas. Estimates of the household budgets of Philadelphia's poor demonstrate that firewood nearly tripled in real prices from 1754 to 1800—an increase that far outstripped contemporaneous increases in other necessities such as food, clothing, and housing. Extreme cold made poverty in urban areas even more dangerous. Severe winters exacerbated persistent health problems facing the poor, and as the historian Susan E. Klepp has argued, "Fuel scarcities and inadequate water supplies may have been a contributing factor in the deaths of the already weak." No matter what their level of hardship, all early nineteenth-century American city residents found heating a primary concern. Few residents were safe, as the wealthy too felt the bite of increasingly severe winters. John Pintard, a well-heeled resident of New York City, wrote to his daughter in February 1817 that with the bitter cold he was "obliged to hold my pen to the fire to thaw the ink." "Indeed my ideas are almost congealed," he concluded.2 |
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