Poverty in the Antebellum Northeast: The View from New York State's Poor Relief Rolls

Abstract

This paper documents a secular increase during the antebellum period in the fraction of New York's population that received public poor relief. The increase was concentrated among able-bodied adults who required only short-term assistance during periods of sickness or unemployment. Cross-sectional patterns suggest that the rise of market production and the spread of wage labor in both urban-industrial and rural-agricultural sectors, rather than urbanization or industrialization, may have been responsible for the upward trend in short-term, ablebodied pauperism.