Liberty's Prisoners. Jen Manion
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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