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chapter nine “To Train Them to Habits of Industry and Usefulness” Molding the Poor Children of Antebellum Savannah timothy j. lockley To suggest that the antebellum elite conceived of benevolence as a tool that would help to control the behavior of the poor no longer raises eyebrows among historians of antebellum reform movements. The debate sparked by the work of Clifford Griffin in the 1950s and continued by historians such as Lois Banner and Lawrence Kohl seems to have run out of steam. Griffin and others argued that “social control” was the main motivating force behind nineteenth-century benevolence as elites sought to check poor people’s “rampant propensities to low and vicious indulgence.” Banner countered this by stressing the genuine desires of the benevolent to assist the poor by opening up new opportunities for them and denying that the elite had a program to mold society into any sort of predetermined shape. In this sense, the elite were only aware of the directions that society should not go. Kohl rightly pointed out the imprecision with which the term “social control”was used,noting that it could mean a variety of things in different contexts, and questioning scholars’ “excessive concern with motive at the expense of results.”1 Since 1985, historians of antebellum reform have continued to amass evidence as to the motivations of the benevolent, and most agree that a desire to control the behavior of the poor was certainly an important element. There is a crucial difference between “social control” and a desire for reform, however. “Social control,” as Kohl pointed out, is widely understood as being “elitist, conservative and repressive,” and no doubt many of those involved with benevolence thought that the poor needed to be controlled ,sometimes institutionalized,for the benefit of wider society.2 Reformers, on the other hand, hoped to give individuals the skills they needed to support 134 children bound to labor themselves and their families—to foster eventual self-reliance. The process of imparting skills might involve a degree of physical control, to break former habits,but ultimately the control would be lifted so that the reformed individuals could take their appropriate place in the social fabric. While “control” and “reform” might be understood to be competing influences on benevolent men and women, in reality they were complementary. Successful reform produced the best form of control—self-control. To have the most beneficial effect, reformers quickly realized that their energies would be best concentrated on poor children who,once reformed,would be useful and productive citizens for the rest of their lives. Moreover, children had not usually fallen into the vices of drunkenness and prostitution that older paupers often had and were therefore perceived to be less fixed in their course and more capable of reform. Historians have not been insensible to this, with case studies of orphanages in Charleston and New Orleans,among others,exploring this aspect of benevolence in detail.3 What has never really been tested, however, is whether the reform of children actually worked. It is reasonably straightforward to document the motives of the benevolent and their desires for the future lives of poor children, but no one has tried to trace the lives of poor American children once they left the care of benevolent societies. Did the children follow the paths mapped out for them by the benevolent elite,leading virtuous lives and becoming useful citizens? Or were their lives seemingly unaffected by the assistance they received as children? In order to test the efficacy of “social control” and “reform” ideas and to answer the above questions, I have taken three benevolent societies from Savannah that were exclusively concerned with poor children— the Union Society, the Savannah Female Asylum, and the Savannah Free School Society—and traced the later lives of many of the children they helped. The city of Savannah, founded on philanthropic principles in the 1730s, was a significant port by the antebellum era. While the city had its fair share of wealthy merchants and planters,the overall population was actually very mixed. The employment opportunities offered by the city attracted hundreds of immigrants , mainly from Ireland and Germany, who joined an existing native-born poor white population, a concentration of free blacks, and thousands of slaves in the urban throng. As one might expect,the lives of the non-elite varied considerably , with age, ability, gender, race, and fortune all playing their part. More than half the...

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