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FeedThe Better Sort
In 1831, upper-crust Pennsylvanians did the math on the state lottery.
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Say what you will about elitists. Those people—the “better sort,” as they once liked to call themselves—got things done.
In the 19th century, when the region’s rich, educated and well-born citizens noticed that Pennsylvania’s prisons were squalid, they caucused at the home of Benjamin Franklin. Then, as the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, they convinced the state to build the first penitentiary intended to reform criminals through solitary confinement. Elitists also built hospitals, founded universities and accomplished the sort of civic improvements that made Philadelphia the “Athens of America.”
Abolition of the lottery? That’s less remembered. But it was a significant accomplishment for leaders like Job R. Tyson of Montgomery County, who’d fought lotteries for decades. The legislature finally acted in 1831, after lottery opponents discovered that a game intended to fund a canal connecting the Schuylkill and Susquehanna rivers had paid out in prizes 147 times what it had delivered in actual construction money.
Tyson & Co. would undoubtedly be impressed by our modern lottery—which collects $3 billion to deliver $1 billion to the state treasury—but not in a good way. (And the casinos? Let’s not go there.)
“How shall we ensure to future generations an exemption from this moral scourge?” Tyson wrote in an 1833 pamphlet in which he proposed that his allies proceed from success at the state level to national abolition of lotteries by amending the U.S. Constitution. Until then, he said, “It will devolve upon good citizens to protect, by their vigilance and zeal, the rights of morality from insult, and existing laws from violation.”
Lottery opponents printed and distributed 5,000 copies of Tyson’s pamphlet, which proved influential in the national debate. By 1860, lotteries were banned in every state.
Born in Philadelphia, Tyson was a sixth-generation Quaker whose family followed the conservative orthodox faction. He attended Friends schools, taught for a while at Hamburg, and then studied law. By the 1850s, he was a lawyer for the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Tyson’s career and family connections put him in a position—and, perhaps, provided an obligation—to be active in civic affairs. He was, after all, the son-in-law of Thomas Pym Cope, one of Philadelphia’s most prominent civic reformers. It was Cope who helped Philadelphia acquire the first pieces of what became Fairmount Park, largely to prevent development along the Schuylkill that would threaten its water supply.
Tyson became a director of the Philadelphia public schools. He also served on the board of the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, a precursor to the Moore College of Art & Design, when such a career was deemed acceptable for unmarried females who needed to support themselves. He was an early member, supporter and vice president of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
As a member of the Prison Society, Tyson was a vocal advocate for construction of Eastern State Penitentiary. In an 1831 speech, he argued that the facility would be worth its extra cost. “The problem of expense, in my opinion, can only be truly solved by that which is most likely to reform [criminals],” said Tyson. “On the score of cost, therefore—if that, indeed, be an object in a work of this magnitude—the solitary [confinement] plan recommends itself.”
Tyson wrote well and quickly, turning out speeches and pamphlets on local history, the state of the Indian tribes, Philadelphia’s business climate, and the issue of slavery. He leaned to the conservative side of the anti-slavery movement, favoring colonization over abolition.
Elected to the 34th Congress, Tyson vigorously defended the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Law, which abolitionists described as sops to slaveholders. “What is the duty of those northern states which have abolished their respective systems of domestic servitude?” asked Tyson in an 1857 speech on the House floor. “Ought they not, in short, to deliver back to their southern brethren fugitives from labor and service as the Constitution enjoins, and as they agreed to do in becoming parties to that solemn instrument of government?”
(Abolitionists who risked war or who encouraged slaves to disobey or flee, said Tyson, “ought to be subjected to the moral treatment of lunatic asylums.”)
