ABSTRACT
This chapter explores first the position of the poor, the several influences gave eighteenth-century Americans a distinctive perspective on poverty. First, that it was not symptomatic of a critical defect in the social order, and second, that the community could handle what need there was without acute strain. Eighteenth-century Americans did not define either poverty or crime as a critical social problem. But within their social and intellectual framework, the colonists followed clear and well-established guidelines. The hierarchical interpretation of the social order was so axiomatic to eighteenth-century society that it was not frequently expounded. The colonial attitudes and practices toward the poor and the criminal, the insane, the orphan, and the delinquent were in almost every aspect remarkably different from those Americans came to share in the pre-Civil War decades. At the root of the religious position was the premise that the existing social order had divine approbation, that its form was not accidental or fortuitous, but providential.
