ABSTRACT
The moral reform leadership of Boston and New York wasted little time attempting to enforce the anti-seduction and anti-abduction laws, and even less time bemoaning their ineffectiveness. Well before the laws were passed, the parent societies had begun to turn their attention elsewhere—to social welfare institution-building in the city. By 1850 the societies had in place several programs that would become models for a new generation of urban benevolent institutions, secular and sectarian, in cities throughout the country over the next two decades. The shift was a response to a growing awareness of the dire needs of the urban poor and carried in its train a new reliance on state support and male sponsorship. For the rural auxiliaries of greater New England, the new focus of attention spelled the end of moral reform as a movement for change and reduced their role to one of donating resources to the social service institutions built by the parent societies. For the historian of the rural auxiliaries, this institutional and ideological retooling of moral reform raises questions about the fate of the movement phase of the 1830s and ’40s: did the urban leaders leave the field in the belief that their reform agenda had succeeded, or that it had been defeated?
