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"Alive to the cry of distress": Joseph and Jane Sill and Poor Relief in Antebellum Philadelphia
| In 1819, Joseph Sill left his home in Cumberland County, England, to start a new life in the United States. Lured by the prospect of a prosperous future in the plentiful American economy, Sill was disappointed upon his arrival in Philadelphia, where he discovered that "all business was at a stand."1 Sill had arrived at the most inopportune time, when the United States was experiencing its first major downturn in the new boom-and-bust cycle of its changing economic system. A harsh reality greeted Sill in Philadelphia: three out of four workers were reportedly jobless, and the city's jail contained 1,808 inmates who had been incarcerated for their inability to pay debts. Philadelphia wheat, which had sold for two dollars and forty-one cents a bushel in 1817, was rapidly descending toward the low of eighty-eight cents it would reach in 1820.2 Sill never forgot the uncertainty he felt upon his arrival to the demoralized Philadelphia of 1819. Even after he had become a successful merchant, his memories of that earlier time led him to reflect on the precariousness of his own and others' personal success. |
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Sill's appreciation for the fickleness of economic prosperity grew as a result of his work with Philadelphia's lower-class population. From the late 1820s until his death in 1854, Joseph Sill and his wife Jane concerned themselves with meeting the needs of Philadelphia's poor. Though the Sills were leaders in the antebellum Philadelphia benevolence movement, historians of poverty and poor relief have often overlooked their work. As secretary, vice president, and president of the Society of the Sons of Saint George (SSSG), an English immigrant aid society, Joseph Sill served as the leading figure of the primary relief organization for incoming English immigrants to the city. Sill's work with the poor through the SSSG and other organizations earned him admiration and a place in Henry Simpson's 1859 The Lives of Eminent Philadelphians Now Deceased.3 As Joseph and Jane Sill conducted their work with the indigent in both institutional and private settings, Joseph Sill became more convinced that poverty was rarely caused by personal moral failure. Instead, he argued, poverty was more often the result of difficult circumstances in an economic system that was hardly forgiving to those on the margins. |
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Much of the history of poor relief in antebellum Philadelphia traces an opposite trajectory in the lives and work of benevolent Philadelphians. Priscilla Clement, for example, has shown that antebellum Philadelphians took an increasingly harsh stance toward the poor in their city and that attitudes of humanitarian benevolence that marked Philadelphia's municipal poor relief system in the early nineteenth century were eventually replaced by feelings of anger and frustration toward the poor.4 Other historians of poor relief in the North have explored the ways that antebellum poor relief workers used benevolence to differentiate themselves from the lower class. Christine Stansell, for example, has examined middle-class women reformers in New York City who used their encounters with poor women to enhance their image as the bearers of virtue in the urban environment in contradistinction to working-class women, whom they viewed as moral inferiors.5 Similarly, Simon Newman argues that members of the antebellum middle and elite classes structured the language and practice of benevolence "to stigmatize and distance themselves from the 'lower sort.'"6 For poor relief workers, benevolence provided an avenue both to practice and display the values that set them apart from the urban lower class.7 |
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