Warming the Poor and Growing Consumers
Fuel Philanthropy in the Early Republic's Urban North
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10017947 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sean Patrick Adam (0009-0001-4505-8121, corresponding author), S P Adams |
| Year | 2008 |
| Volume | 95 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 69-94 |
| Publication date | 2008-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/25095465 |
| OpenAlex | W2322056708 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 2 |
Residents of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia at the turn of the nineteenth century had every reason to be optimistic, as their cities blossomed as centers of commerce, culture, and industry in a young, growing nation. But no matter how rosy the future might appear, the winters of the early republic seemed to get worse and worse. Take the southernmost city of the three, Philadelphia. In the winter of 1805, when snow drifts reached thirty inches high, the price of a cord of oak wood—traditionally defined as a stack four feet high, four feet wide, and eight feet long—shot up to $12. That was more than double the price per cord earlier that year. The city's working poor suffered the most under such conditions. The Philadelphia American Daily Advertiser reported that one family, “having expended all their wood, was under the direful necessity, in order to keep themselves from perishing, to burn their table, washing-tub, and many other articles of household furniture.” Many froze to death in their own homes. “Scenes like these proclaim the uncertainty of human possessions & enjoyments & the incapacity of man to protect himself against adversity,” the Philadelphia merchant Thomas P. Cope wrote in his diary that winter. “It is during these seasons of suffering that the voice of omnipotence is heard & confessed.” During February of 1809 Charles Peirce, an amateur historian of Philadelphia weather, estimated the average temperature at twenty-six degrees Fahrenheit and recorded three consecutive days when the thermometer remained below zero. The poor suffered the brunt of the bitter season as firewood shortages caused the price of fuel to spike yet again. In this most temperate of the major northern cities of the early republic—in which the physician, geologist, and amateur meteorologist James Mease bragged that “our winters are less uniformly cold, and more variable” than those of other cities and that the Delaware River froze solid for only two weeks at a time by 1811—the pinch of cold weather coupled with fuel shortages made urban life more and more difficult in the winter.1
Amateur · Archaeology · Business · Economic history · Order (exchange · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · Finance · History
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.19 |
| Citation span | 2010 - 2011 (2) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |