The Role of the Almshouse in Early Republic and Antebellum Baltimore
BHW 34: September 23, 2023
Reflecting on the significance of Baltimore’s almshouse in 1833, self-described “civil engineer” Charles Varle wrote, “the present large and elegant Alm’s House [sic]… in point of extent, convenience, and beauty of location, certainly is not surpassed by any similar establishment in the United States.” [2] It is unclear if Varle sufficiently considered the merits of other almshouses along the East Coast of the U.S. in this period. He is also biased as the author of a prominent guidebook for Baltimore City. What is clear is that the early Baltimore almshouse served malleable social functions that became increasingly specific as American capitalism developed. The racialized problematization of poverty fostered the white public health concerns that the almshouse sought to alleviate. Meanwhile, almshouse leaders sought to turn renegades from capitalism into moral, devoted workers. This study will use historian Seth Rockman’s definition of the almshouse in its Baltimore context. As he explains, “Located on the outskirts of the city, the almshouse was a public resource for those who could not support themselves through labor. This single institution functioned as a hospital for the sick, an asylum for the mentally ill, a prison for convicted vagrants, a workhouse for the unemployed, and a shelter for the homeless.” [3] This story began with the Maryland General Assembly’s appointment of a group of trustees for the creation of a Baltimore almshouse in 1773. [4] The first Baltimore almshouse building was constructed the very next year. [5] Early republic and antebellum Baltimore’s almshouse histories provide insights into the medicalization of institutionalization, the whiteness of public aid, and the almshouse as a moral reformatory.
In 1789, a physician was appointed to the Baltimore almshouse for the first time, rendering it a formal public health institution. [6] From that point on, the rising social emphasis on medical expertise in the United States paralleled the increasing medicalization of the Baltimore almshouse. By 1818, the Maryland General Assembly ruled that a physician must always be present at the almshouse. It also ruled almshouse physicians must be chosen from either the University of Maryland medical faculty or from other fully credentialed Baltimore medical practitioners. [7] The recommended association with the University of Maryland School of Medicine reflected support for turning the almshouse into a medical teaching institution, amongst its other functions. While some scholars deem almshouses hospitals in and of themselves, it seems useful to draw a distinction between the medicalized almshouse starting in 1789 and its prior period of being a catch-all solution for public poverty. [8] In the post-1789 period, being institutionalized at the almshouse also meant being admitted for medical treatment. It became, as Rockman writes, “an early republic emergency room” while also maintaining non-medical functions. For some residents, especially in the working-class neighborhoods of Fells Point and Old Town, the almshouse was one of the most convenient places to receive medical treatment. [9]
Even in its pre-hospital period, the Baltimore almshouse at a minimum provided admittees with wholesome nutrition, adequate lodging, and clean clothing. For people struggling with poverty in early republic and antebellum Baltimore, meeting these basic needs allowed them to improve their health. Applying for admission to the Baltimore almshouse was thus an act of self-preservation and self-care throughout its history. Community philanthropist Thomas W. Griffith described the almshouse diet in 1821 as including, “coffee and rye mixed, and sweetened with molasses for breakfast… tea sweetened with brown sugar for supper; fresh meat soup four days, salt meat two days and fish one day of the week, with vegetables, for dinner,” along with rations of bread and milk. This seems like a more nutritious diet than that of an average person living in poverty. [10] Additionally, almshouse admittees received fresh linen clothes that they were permitted to keep following their departure from the institution. [11] These provisions made it likely that people would leave the almshouse in better physical condition than they arrived. Since much of Baltimore’s labor force was seasonal, increased numbers of Baltimoreans went to the almshouse during the winter months. Baltimore gets frigid in the winter, so the secure lodging of the almshouse also provided potentially life-saving shelter from the cold. [12] However, these almshouse life preservation opportunities were not equally available to all Baltimoreans.
Starting in the 1820s, African Americans were consistently underrepresented in the Baltimore almshouse. [13] While almshouse administrators claimed they did not racially discriminate in admissions, it appears this was not the case. Moreover, some of the lack of Black Baltimorean representation appears due to Black Baltimorean resistance to the almshouse institution itself. Freedom from slavery was tenuous for antebellum free Black Baltimoreans, living as they did in one of the main hubs of the domestic slave trade. One way Black freedom was lessened was through Maryland’s orphans’ courts, which bound out Black Marylanders for periods of indenture and apprenticeship. The almshouse was a pathway to apprenticeship. As historian Jessica Millward points out, “In 1818, the state of Maryland authorized the judges of the orphans’ courts to bind out the children of ‘free negroes and mulattoes [sic].’ By 1825, ‘the children of any free negroes or mulattoes, not having visible means of supporting them, may be bound out by the orphans’ court as apprentices.” [14] If a Black Baltimorean was an almshouse admission candidate, that likely meant they were facing financial strain sufficient to meet these apprenticeship requirements. Such apprenticeships reproduced the exploitative and involuntary labor relations of slavery. Almshouse trustees also had the legal power to accelerate the orphans’ court process by unilaterally entering admittee children into indenture contracts. [15] Millward notes that, “Free black parents took a proactive approach to apprenticeship arrangements to prevent orphans’ court from binding children into unfavorable agreements.” While she relates this to servitude to desired craftspeople, it can also be applied to proactively avoiding threats to freedom posed by Black presence at the almshouse. [16]
Baltimore almshouse proponents saw the institution as a moral reformatory that would reshape wayward Baltimoreans into moral and productive members of industrial society. Religion played a significant role in this moral benevolence agenda. Both Christianity and the Protestant ethic demanded benevolence from the rich. The very idea of giving alms to people experiencing poverty is lifted straight from the Bible. However, the Protestant ethic also specifically demanded hard work and morality from people facing poverty. As a result, at times a distinction was drawn between worthy and unworthy alms-seekers. [17] Almshouse administrators sought to admit people who were committed to their own moral betterment. The moral reform function of the almshouse could only work with the cooperation of reform recipients. Race likely played a role in administrator determinations of such worthiness, with white Baltimoreans most likely to be given the benefit of the doubt. Almshouse leaders also believed in the redemptive potential of hard work, putting able-bodied admittees to work to reinvigorate tendencies of industriousness and productivity. [18] The regular work, meal, and sleep schedule in the almshouse was to similarly encourage well-structured and thus efficient living after discharge. Yet, as historian Walter I. Trattner emphasizes, “The ‘worthy’ poor soon discovered that no matter how hard they struggled they still were condemned as moral failures.” [19] In the rugged individualistic capitalism of the early United States, financial struggle was generally deemed indicative of moral weakness. However, Baltimoreans continued to rely on the almshouse to morally reform the impoverished for lack of a proposed better alternative. [20]
Baltimore almshouse histories provide substantial insights into the medicalization of institutionalization, the race-related provision of public aid, or lack thereof, and the almshouse as a redemptive moral reformatory. When almshouses were largely replaced by modern hospitals in the postbellum period, a physical manifestation of the social safety net was lost. The Baltimore almshouse story is one of possibility for temporarily downtrodden Baltimoreans. By gaining admission to the almshouse, they could be theoretically lifted out of perceived misery and brought back to socio-economic productivity. While hospitalization in America today offers basic provisions of food and clothing comparable to the almshouse, its function is much more narrowly defined. Modern hospitals are still significantly used to incarcerate people and temporarily shelter people from homelessness, but these functions are deemed subsidiary. By contrast, these non-medical aspects were core functions of the almshouse. The other main difference between the almshouse and the modern hospital is the price tag. The Baltimore almshouse was substantially publicly funded and of minimal required cost to admittees, unlike the notoriously expensive twenty-first century American hospital. While admittees were encouraged to work off the standard thirty-cent admission fee, almost a quarter left without paying. [21] One implication of the existence of the almshouse was that unforeseen circumstances could pose significant challenges to self-sufficiency in the capitalist economy of the early United States. Thus, the public funded the almshouse as a place of relatively affordable emergency aid to get people back on their feet. Regardless of the religious motivations behind this benevolence, it provided a significant manifestation of a welfare state in early Baltimore. Since the demise of the American almshouse, the parameters of tangible social relief and assistance are less clear.
[1] Smallbones, “Hebrew Orphan Asylum on the NRHP since October 28, 2010,” photograph (Baltimore, May 30, 2013), Creative Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orphans_Asylum_Baltimore.JPG#/media/File:Orphans_Asylum_Baltimore.JPG.
[2] Charles Varle, A Complete View of Baltimore (Baltimore: Samuel Young, 1833), 90, https://www.loc.gov/item/04004890/.
[3] Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 194, https://archive.org/details/scrapingbywagela0000rock.
[4] Douglass G. Carroll, Jr. and Blanche D. Coll, “The Baltimore Almshouse: An Early History,” Maryland Historical Magazine 66, no. 2 (Summer 1971): 138-139, https://archive.org/details/msa_sc_5881_1_262.
[5] Toba Schwaber Kerson, “ALMSHOUSE TO MUNICIPAL HOSPITAL: THE BALTIMORE EXPERIENCE,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 55, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 203, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44441349.
[6] Kerson, “ALMSHOUSE TO MUNICIPAL HOSPITAL,” 204.
[7] Carroll and Coll, “The Baltimore Almshouse,” 208.
[8] Carroll and Coll, “The Baltimore Almshouse,” 138.
[9] Rockman, Scraping By, 205.
[10] Thomas W. Griffith, “Alms and Work House,” c. 1821, filed under Property of the Poor, No. 5, Maryland Historical Society, reprinted in Carroll and Coll, “The Baltimore Almshouse,” 151.
[11] Rockman, Scraping By, 204-205.
[12] Blanche D. Coll, “The Baltimore Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, 1820-1822,” The American Historical Review 61, no. 1 (October 1955): 78, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1845329.
[13] Adam Malka, The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 181, Kindle edition.
[14] Jessica Millward, Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2015), 63, Kindle edition.
[15] Rockman, Scraping By, 207.
[16] Millward, Finding Charity’s Folk, 63.
[17] Walter I. Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America, 5th edition (New York: The Free Press, 1994 [1974]), 56-57, https://archive.org/details/frompoorlawtowel00trat.
[18] Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 24-25, https://archive.org/details/inshadowofpoorho0000katz_u3t8.
[19] Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State, 56.
[20] Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, xii.
[21] Malka, The Men of Mobtown, 75.
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