ABSTRACT
From Tocqueville's time to our own, antebellum America has en joyed the reputation of being a society marked by an unprecedented economic equality. No one, not even the most inveterate yeasayer, believed that material goods and services were distributed perfectly equally. Blacks and Indians, and the masses of new Irish immigrants obviously were not in on the feast. But it has been widely believed that the cornucopia was almost equally available to all others. Even a modern scholar who has asserted that heavy immigration and industrialization widened the economic gulf between the classes after 1830, concedes that earlier, "there did not appear to be any contradiction between the notion of equality of opportunity and a general equality of condition." 1 A few contemporaries, such as the wealthy philanthropist Mathew Carey, and the radical labor spokesman Seth Luther, dissented from the consensus and attempted to expose the plight of the "laboring poor." 2 Several modern scholarly studies have also questioned, if indirectly, the extent of equality by focusing on the existence of large pockets of poverty, particu larly in urban milieus. 5
The facts that, as reported by the Boston Prison Discipline Society in 1829, 75,000 persons were annually imprisoned for debt in the United States-more than half of them owing less than twenty-five dollars-or that hundreds of private charitable associations sprang up in cities during the period to supplement the work of municipal governments in dealing with poverty, are clear signs that material deprivation afflicted many persons.4 Congressional reports on debt and debtors, stories in the labor press, and the observations of sympathetic contemporaries, reveal a pattern of want that obviously detracts from the era's reputation for equality. But, if these sources indicate that inequality prevailed in the early nineteenth century, they are not at all precise as to the extent of the inequality. In this chapter, therefore, I shall attempt to work out an
estimate that is both more exact and more comprehensive than the im pressions yielded by partial and random examinations.5
