Before the Civil War, most poor relief efforts in the United States had their roots in traditional English poor laws dating from the late sixteenth century. These efforts were primarily guided by state laws, and relief was performed primarily at the state and local levels of government.

These state laws, along with the U.S. Constitution's Tenth Amendment ["The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people"] meant that responsibility for providing relief for the poor rested not on any federal authority, nor even explicitly on state governments, but rather on local ones or more commonly, on private charities or individuals themselves. The poor relied mainly on individual philanthropy, local public and private institutions (primarily churches during this period), and their own extended families. This...