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Reviewed by:
  • From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840–1918
  • Alisha M. Cromwell
Gunja SenGupta. From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840–1918. New York: New York University Press, 2009. v + 333 pp. ISBN 978-0-8147-4061-3, $48.00 (hardback).

When the African American burial ground was rediscovered by construction workers in lower Manhattan in 1991, people were amazed at the size and scope of the cemetery. The discovery of the [End Page 204] physical remains of hundreds of people made it difficult to brush aside the uncomfortable fact that African and African American people were held in bondage in New York. While many scholars have described, documented, and investigated slavery in New York, Gunja SenGupta expands on these earlier studies by examining the construction of race and American identity through the language of welfare reform during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 18401918, SenGupta focuses on how the “legacies of hereditary bondage (and, later, herrenvolk republicanism) were to shape a racialized policy of relief and reform that treated destitute African Americans differently than their European immigrant counterparts” (33). She utilizes a number of compelling sources, such as the case histories of both black and white inmates housed in various facilities around the city, ex-slave biographies from the Colored Home that were published as a pamphlet titled Broken Gloom, and census data, to examine how bourgeois reformers constructed their ideal of American citizenry based specifically on whiteness.

SenGupta employs the concept “subaltern” to discuss the African American and Irish working classes in New York. She defines this construct as “individuals or groups whose subordination in terms race, ethnicity, class, gender, and religion was relational rather than absolute, and who practiced a brand of subversion that operated at least partially from within the system that sought to reform them” (18). Describing the African American and Irish in New York as subalterns, an expression usually employed when discussing marginalized groups in other parts of the world, is a unique way to interrogate the making of class and race in the United States. SenGupta brings the voice of the often invisible people of New York back into the formation of welfare discourse and argues that these people often applied the language of their bourgeois reformers to shift blame from themselves to society at large.

SenGupta’s strongest evidence for the relationship between African Americans and the Irish in welfare discourse comes from her analysis of New York’s census data. Investigating household economies provides SenGupta with initial information about distinct cultural constructs that not only separated Blacks from the Irish but also showed their similarities. The 1855 census allows her to explore how poor African Americans created living situations and familial structures that diverged from the newly immigrated Irish. In both groups, women were normally the heads of households, but Black families tended to live more communally, while the Irish remained in smaller familial units. SenGupta argues that “the resilience of family and communal impulses among African Americans appears [End Page 205] to have survived the ravages of slavery” and that the “workings of female kin networks, coupled with job opportunities for men in the West, feminized New York’s Irish immigrant community” (55/62). By looking at the gendered language that census takers and reformers associated with poverty, SenGupta provides important background information on the difficult living situations and insufficient employment opportunities that placed many Black and Irish women and children into the public welfare system while also exploring how these public institutions interacted differently with each race.

Although SenGupta’s main focus is on the language of welfare reform, she expertly details New York’s political history as well. From The Know Nothings, Tammany Hall, and the New York Board of Commissioners of Emigration legislation, SenGupta explores middle-class attitudes toward poverty through a political lens and examines how they tried to address this problem in accordance with their ideals of republicanism, charity, and capitalism, which they believed would transform poor people into Americans worthy of self-governance. SenGupta traces out the...

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