Orphan Trains

by Stephen O'Connor

  As much as Brace’s work with the Children’s Aid Society may have satisfied his desire for prestige and power, it was nevertheless the single greatest moral effort of his life. In simplest terms, this book is an attempt to measure the virtue of that effort by examining its motives and by tracing its consequences, both during Brace’s lifetime and after. The earliest chapters explore what in Brace’s experiences and era made the idea of sending even small children hundreds of miles from home to live with total strangers seem natural and good. Later chapters discuss the successes and failures of Brace’s efforts, and those of his imitators, and show how changing ideas of childhood, work, bondage, and the nature of society caused what had once seemed an act of nearly unassailable wisdom and compassion to appear cruelly indifferent to the very children it had been designed to help.

  The true measure of the virtue of Brace’s effort lies in its effect on the lives of these children. This book illustrates that effect by looking at the fates of orphan train riders in aggregate, and by telling the stories of particular children: John Jackson, who at five years old walked off after a marching band and never found his way home again; a lame street peddler named Johnny Morrow, who won over the Children’s Aid Society staff by fulfilling their most sentimental fantasies; Lotte Stern, a ragpicker’s fourteen-year-old daughter who, like so many girls of her time, was forced into prostitution and then damned for it by society; John Brady and Andrew Burke, who rode the same orphan train in 1859 and became, respectively, the governors of Alaska and North Dakota; and Charley Miller, who shot two young men dead on a boxcar in Wyoming because, as he put it at his trial, he was lonely and cold and so far from home.

  A cautionary note: although the term “orphan trains” has a poetic resonance and a degree of recognition that made it the all-but-inevitable title for this book, in some ways it misrepresents the placement efforts of the CAS and other agencies. During the orphan train era itself, none of these agencies ever actually used the term in their official publications. The CAS referred to its relevant division first as the Emigration Department, then as the Home-Finding Department, and finally, as the Department of Foster Care. The Foundling Hospital sent out what it called “baby” or “mercy” trains. And almost everybody else referred to the practice as “family placement” or “out-placement” (“out” to distinguish it from the placement of children “in” orphanages or asylums). The term “orphan trains” may have been coined by a journalist sometime in the early twentieth century, but it did not come into its present wide currency until long after the close of the era, perhaps as recently as 1978, when CBS aired a fictional miniseries entitled The Orphan Trains.

  One reason the term was not used by placement agencies was that less than half of the children who rode the trains were in fact orphans, and as many as 25 percent had two living parents. Children with both parents living ended up on the trains—or in orphanages—because their families did not have the money or desire to raise them or because they had been abused or abandoned or had run away. And many teenage boys and girls went to orphan train sponsoring organizations simply in search of work or a free ticket out of the city.

  The term “orphan trains” is also misleading because a substantial number of the placed-out children never took the railroad to their new homes, or even traveled very far. Although the majority of children placed by the CAS went to the Midwest and West, the state that received the greatest number by far (nearly one-third of the total) was New York; Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania also received substantial numbers of children. The main goal of the Emigration Plan was to remove children from slums, where opportunities were scant and “immoral influences” plentiful, and to place them in “good Christian homes.” In part because Brace considered the country fundamentally more beneficent, and in part because the demand for children (as laborers and for adoption) was always highest in the least-settled areas, the typical good Christian home was a farm. But the CAS did place many children not only near New York but right in the city itself.

  What is more, for most of the orphan train era, the CAS bureaucracy made no distinction between local placements and even its most distant ones. They were all written up in the same record books and, on the whole, managed by the same people. Also, the same child might be placed one time in the West and the next time—if the first home did not work out—in New York City. The decision about where to place a child was made almost entirely on the basis of which alternative was most readily available at the moment the child needed help.

  Because distant and local placements were so functionally interchangeable, discussing only what might be called “classic” orphan train placement—groups of children distributed far from New York City—would distort the nature and goals of orphan train programs and misrepresent the experiences of many of the placed children. Such a focus would also obscure the fact that, in an important sense, the orphan train era never ended. What really happened is that during the first decades of the twentieth century, as a result of demographic, political, and social changes, fewer and fewer children were sent to homes in other states and more and more were placed locally. Decades before the last orphan train left for Texas, all of the main placement organizations—including the CAS—had become primarily what we would call foster care and adoption agencies. But for the people operating these agencies, the transformation was only in how they did their work (more screening and monitoring of placements), not in the work’s fundamental nature and goals.

  It is important—even consummately important—not to obscure the connection between the orphan trains and our own child welfare programs, because the consequences of Brace’s moral effort end—if they may be said to have ended at all—only now, in this moment, and ineach succeeding moment, as we ourselves decide what we can and should do to help the “poor and friendless” children of our own time. It is my hope that, as we discover how well or ill Brace and his followers promoted the happiness of children during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we will better understand how we might serve those children who most need our help at the start of this new millennium.

  PART I

  WANT

  TESTIMONY

  JOHN BRADY

  I cannot speak of my parents with any certainty at all. I recollect having an aunt by the name of Julia B——. She had me in charge for some time, and made known some things to me of which I have a faint remembrance. She married a gentleman in Boston, and left me to shift for myself in the streets of [New York City]. I could not have been more than seven or eight years of age at the time. She is greatly to be excused for this act, since I was a very bad boy, having an abundance of self-will.

  At this period I became a vagrant, roaming over all parts of the city. I would often pick up a meal at the markets or at the docks, where they were unloading fruit. At a later hour in the night I would find a resting-place in some box or hogshead, or in some dark hole under a staircase.

  The boys that I fell in company with would steal and swear, and of course I contracted those habits too. I have a distinct recollection of stealing up upon houses to tear lead from the chimneys, and then take it privily away to some junk-shop, as they call it; with the proceeds I would buy a ticket for the pit in the Chatham-street Theatre, and something to eat with the remainder. This is the manner in which I was drifting out in the stream of life, when some kind person from your Society persuaded me to go to Randall’s Island. I remained at this place two years. Sometime in July, 1859, one of your agents came there and asked how many boys who had no parents would love to have nice homes in the West, where they could drive horses and oxen, and have as many apples and melons as they could wish. I happened to be one of the many who responded in the affirmative.

  On the fourth of August twenty-one of us had homes procured for us at N——, Ind. A lawyer from T——, who chanced to be engaged in court matters, was at N——at the time. He desired to take a boy home with him, and I was the one assigned him. He owns a farm of two hundred
acres lying close to town. Care was taken that I should be occupied there and not in town. I was always treated as one of the family. In sickness I was ever cared for by prompt attention. In winter I was sent to the Public School. The family room was a good school to me, for there I found the daily papers and a fair library.

  After a period of several years . . . I had accumulated some property on the farm in the shape of a horse, a yoke of oxen, etc., amounting in all to some $300. These I turned into cash, and left for a preparatory school. . . . I remained there three years, relying greatly on my own efforts for support. . . . I have now resumed my duties as a Sophomore [at Yale], in faith in Him who has ever been my best friend. If I can prepare myself for acting well my part in life by going through the college curriculum, I shall be satisfied.

  I shall ever acknowledge with gratitude that the Children’s Aid Society has been the instrument of my elevation.

  To be taken from the gutters of New York City and placed in a college is almost a miracle.1

  HARRY MORRIS

  When I arrived at N.Y., I never seen so many relations as I had and all was tickled to see me. The Pennsylvania Station has several entrances to get through so as not to miss me, they were coupled at every one. My sister-in-law was the lucky one to see me first.

  My, but what a home-coming that was, I will never forget it as long as I live. Would of the Aid Society done justice I would of found my parents long, long before I did. After the reunion I told mother that I was going to the Aid Society and I wanted her to go along. . . . The moment I stepped in the door, the elderly man sitting at the desk recognized my mother and said to her, “This isn’t the son that we had, is it? The one we sent out west.” My mother said to him, yes, he wants to speak to you in person. Well, what a fine lad this is, he had no more than got lad out of his tongue, then I told him what I thought of the Childrens Aid Society of N.Y.C. and I told him I was going to let the whole world know what kind of people you were and also how you made misrepresentations and I had the pleasure of telling him that the Aid Society never placed me in any home to make me what I was. He sure did back water and he was just like a whipped dog when I got through telling him facts about the life I went through. He begged me to keep mum and offered me reward for not mention of the statements but his money was just like his representatives,—FALSE.2

  1

  The Good Father

  CHARLES LORING BRACE was born on June 19, 1826, in Litchfield, Connecticut, a small but prosperous village, wholly lacking in urban luxury or vice, but providing its residents with something approaching urban levels of learning and culture. It was the home of the nation’s first law school, founded by Tapping Reeve in 1784, which numbered among its graduates Vice Presidents Aaron Burr and John C. Calhoun and the educator Horace Mann. It was also the home of one of the first secondary schools for girls in the United States, the Litchfield Female Academy, graduates of which included Harriet Beecher Stowe and her sister Catharine Beecher. Litchfield’s best-known native son was Ethan Allen, leader of a Revolutionary War militia group, the Green Mountain Boys, but during the Brace family’s tenure the village’s most illustrious resident was the Congregational preacher Lyman Beecher—the father not only of Catharine and Harriet but also of the celebrated (and at times infamous) liberal minister Henry Ward Beecher. The Braces and the Beechers would become deeply intertwined over the years, and each family would exert a profound influence on the development of the other’s social activism.

  One of the most important of these influences was in some ways the most indirect. Among his many other accomplishments, Lyman Beecher was a founder of the social movement in which Charles Loring Brace would make his career. In 1812, distressed by increasing drunkenness, crime, and irreligious behavior, especially in America’s rapidly growing cities, Beecher told some thirty Congregational clergymen whom he had invited to a meeting in New Haven: “The mass is changing. We are becoming another people. Our habits have held us long after those moral causes that formed them have ceased to operate. These habits, at length, are giving way.” If swift action were not taken, Beecher warned, the nation would soon be overrun by a tide of “Sabbath-breakers, rum-selling, tippling folk, infidels” and “ruff-scruff.” Beecher proposed combating this tide through the foundation of a “Society for the Suppression of Vice and the Promotion of Good Morals.” This organization would be a “moral militia” composed of “wise and good” citizens who would oppose vice and “infidelity” by preaching to likely perpetrators, holding prayer meetings, and passing out religious literature.1

  Partly through Beecher’s example and vocal advocacy, similar moral reform societies were soon founded all along the Eastern Seaboard and as far west as Saint Louis. The “wise and good” who staffed these societies were generally evangelical clerics whose primary goal was to attract converts. Over time, however, these domestic missionaries learned that the best way to draw people to their sermons was by offering benefits such as food, clothing, and schooling. This was the aspect of the movement that ultimately would most impress Charles Loring Brace. He would carry it a step further, however, and thereby help pave the way for the emergence of modern social work, all but abandoning conversion and making service (or “aid”) the top priority of his own moral reform society.

  Lyman Beecher never played any direct role in Brace’s choice of career. He moved to Boston the year Brace was born and was living in Cincinnati when Brace began working with the poor in New York City. The elder Beecher and the Brace family also stood on opposite sides of their era’s culture wars. Whereas the Braces, though devout Congregationalists, were dedicated rationalists with a strong interest in natural science, Lyman Beecher was a conservative Calvinist who saw science and rationalism as the enemies of faith. It was Lyman’s children, especially his two famous daughters, who would forge the strongest ties with the Brace family. But, at the very least, Lyman Beecher presided over Charles’s childhood and youth as an exemplar—a man who made the career of activist-minister a compelling possibility.

  John Pierce Brace, Charles’s father, first knew Lyman Beecher as a landlord. John Brace came to Litchfield to be chief instructor at the Litchfield Female Academy and rented a room in the Beechers’ plain, often added-to clapboard parsonage—described by Stowe as “a wide, roomy, windy edifice that seemed to have been built by a series of afterthoughts.”2 Despite their philosophical differences, John Brace soon won at least the cordial respect of the famous minister, if for no other reason than that Brace was the favorite teacher of Beecher’s younger daughter, Harriet. In her autobiography, Stowe called John Brace “one of the most stimulating and inspiring instructors I ever knew”3 and made him the model for Mr. Rossiter, the brilliant teacher in her novel Oldtown Folks:

  Mr. Jonathan Rossiter held us all by the sheer force of his personal character and will, just as the ancient mariner held the wedding guest with his glittering eye. . . . He scorned all conventional rules in teaching, and he would not tolerate a mechanical lesson, and took delight in puzzling his pupils and breaking up all routine business by startling and unexpected questions and assertions. He compelled everyone to think and to think for himself. “Your heads may not be the best in the world,” was one of his sharp off-hand sayings, “but they are the best God has given you, and you must use them for yourselves.”4

  John Brace had come to the Litchfield Female Academy through sheer nepotism. His aunt, Sarah Pierce, founded the school in her dining room in 1792, and she seemed to have pegged her nephew as a potential teacher from his earliest childhood. She and her sister Mary oversaw his education in Hartford, where he had been born, and paid his tuition at Williams College. For a while John seems to have considered entering the ministry, but in 1814 he acceded to Sarah’s wishes and moved to Litchfield to become the head teacher at her school.

  By the time John Brace arrived, the academy had long since moved from the Pierce sisters’ dining room to a large, white, Greek Revival building, on the village’s fashionable No
rth Street, just one hundred yards closer to the center of town than the Beechers’ roomy residence. Each year up to 140 students came to the school from as far away as Ohio and the West Indies, as well as from New York and all parts of New England. Although Sarah Pierce had intended the school to “vindicate the equality of the female intellect,” she had not herself received the level of education she desired to provide her students and had been heavily influenced by condescending British advice books on teaching young women. Catharine Beecher, who attended the academy before John Brace’s arrival, recalled in her autobiography: “At that time, the higher branches had not entered the female schools. Map drawing, painting, embroidery and the piano were the accomplishments sought, and history was the only study added to geography, grammar, and arithmetic.”5 In their assigned essays the girls were expected to meditate only on such “female” virtues as contentment, cheerfulness, charity, and forgiveness.

  All this changed once John Brace became the head teacher. His first assignment to Catharine’s younger sister Harriet, for example, was to write about “The Difference Between the Natural and the Moral Sublime.” And Harriet’s earliest literary triumph was an essay responding to Brace’s question: “Can the immortality of the soul be proved by the light of nature?”6