Orphan Trains

by Stephen O'Connor

  Under John Brace’s direction, Litchfield girls undertook a curriculum—including science, higher mathematics, logic, and Latin—that at the very least equaled that of most boys’ academies. In one subject area Litchfield girls clearly exceeded their counterparts at the male schools, and that was moral philosophy, which boys were not expected to study until college.

  Although John Brace was far from being above the sexist double standards that prevailed in his day, his educational agenda had a decidedly feminist slant. He specifically worked against the stereotype of women as charming but superficial creatures who lacked the intellectual fortitude to master their emotional impulses. In an address to the graduating class of 1816, he explained that he wanted students “to feel but to feel in subordination to reason.” Education, he told the new graduates, would improve woman’s “rank in society, placing her as the rational companion of man, not the slave of his pleasures or the victim of tyranny.”7

  As significant a figure as John Brace would be in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s life, and later also in Catharine Beecher’s, it was in fact through his marriage that he became most intimately connected with the Beecher family. Lucy Porter, Lyman Beecher’s sister-in-law, came to Litchfield for an extended visit in 1819. By early 1820 she and John Brace had married, and later that same year their first child, Mary, was born. The Braces continued to live with the Beechers until 1822, when they moved to a home of their own nearby. It was in this house, some four years afterward, that John and Lucy’s second child, Charles, was born.

  During the early nineteenth century the United States was undergoing a dramatic shift in social organization. An economy composed primarily of small-scale independent entrepreneurs—farmers, craftspeople, and shopkeepers—was giving way to one of large-scale capitalists and industrialists, and decidedly economically dependent wage earners. Many people became wonderfully rich as a result of this transformation, and many became desperately poor. All of these changes—especially the fact that people increasingly worked outside the home—profoundly altered the roles of men and women, and the ways in which they understood and raised their children. Charles Loring Brace’s upbringing, like that of most of his generation, was the product of a clash between the old and the new ways—a clash that affected both the sort of “aid” he came to feel poor children most needed and the way that aid was understood by the larger society.

  The Puritans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries believed that children were born damned. This was not mere theology, but a fact parents witnessed every day in their children’s behavior. To Anne Bradstreet, sinning commenced with a child’s first breath:

  Stained from birth with Adams sinfull fact,

  Thence I began to sin as soon as act:

  A perverse will, a love to what’s forbid,

  A serpents sting in pleasing face lay hid:

  A lying tongue as soon as it could speak,

  And the fifth Commandment do daily break.8

  In essence, the Puritans had what most people today would think of as an inverted image of the soul’s progress: starting in corruption and, through God’s grace, ending in innocence. The mechanism by which the soul was cleansed of original sin (“Adams sinfull fact”) was “conversion,” or being “born again”—a spontaneous and often ecstatic union of the individual with God. The problem was that there was no way to achieve conversion. God was almighty, absolutely free, and could not be constrained even by the obligation to reward goodness and punish sin. He had chosen that small portion of humanity he was going to save—the “elect”—for his own inscrutable reasons back before the beginning of time, and there was no way for men or women to change his mind. There was also no way to know for certain who was among the elect. Even one’s own apparent conversion might be an illusion spun by the Devil to lure one into the sin of pride. Some theologians maintained that the elect would not know they were saved until they found themselves in Paradise. Although God was technically free to grant second birth even to the most loathsome of sinners, most people assumed that he did not have much use for this freedom, and that the elect could be identified by their superior virtue—especially by their capacity for self-denial.

  Adam and Eve fell because they were ambitious and put their own desires ahead of God’s. They wanted knowledge and to move up in the world (“Your eyes shall be opened,” said the serpent, “and ye shall be as gods, knowing both good and evil”). The child in Anne Bradstreet’s poem was not merely stained by the consequences of their ambition, but still possessed, from birth, by their “perverse will, a love to what’s forbid.” Puritans believed that virtue lay only in the suppression of what they called “self-will” and its replacement by a desire to serve, obey, and glorify God. For many Puritans the mere existence of a child’s will was nigh unto a perversity all by itself. John Robinson, the original minister at the Pilgrims’ Plymouth Colony, advised his parishioners:

  Surely there is in all children . . . a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; . . . Children should not know, if it could be kept from them, that they have a will in their own, but in the parents’ keeping; neither should these words be heard from them, save by way of consent, “I will” or “I will not.”9

  Puritan parents loved their children as much as parents ever have, but they did not see love as the unalloyed blessing we generally understand it to be today. Love was, after all, yet another carnal impulse, and as such it might lead parents to shirk their responsibility both to God and to their children. Letting a “pleasing face” divert one from subjecting a child to necessary discipline was not only sinful but possibly a sign that both parent and child were headed for eternal damnation. According to one Puritan adviser, parents were to keep “due distance” from their offspring because “fondness and familiarity breeds and causeth contempt and irreverence in children.”10

  In certain instances, parental love could even be equated with sin. When an impoverished couple in Northampton, Massachusetts, went to court in 1680 to stop their children from being forcibly indentured by the civil authorities, the judge rejected their arguments, declaring that “what the Parents Spoke [was] more out of fond affection and sinful Indulgence than any Reason or Rule.”11

  Slowly during the eighteenth century, and more rapidly during the nineteenth, the foundations for many of these beliefs began to crumble, partly under the assault of rationalism and Romanticism, but mostly through the successes of capitalism. Between 1820 and 1860 per capita income rose 50 percent12—although not among industrial workers—and thanks to the advent of mass production and inexpensive transportation, many goods became much cheaper. Women no longer had to spend days weaving cloth and stitching it into clothing but could outfit their families through a single shopping trip. Infection rates declined because of the piping of fresh water into cities and the easy accessibility of factory-produced soap and cotton underwear. And both heating and cooking became more efficient through the development of cast-iron stoves. For many people, especially in the expanding middle and upper classes, life was much easier, and the idea of a strict and vengeful God no longer seemed as natural as it had during earlier, harder eras. More to the point, growing numbers of people began to believe that the true elect were not those who most loved God, but those who most loved money.

  Puritan culture was also undermined by capitalism’s disconcerting effect on sex roles. Many affluent women found that they had become what some scholars call “economically superfluous.” Whereas their mothers had added to the family coffers by tending livestock and gardens and making clothing, these women only spent their husband’s money at stores and on the servants who performed almost every household labor. Understanding, at least intuitively, that in most ways life would have gone on unchanged in their homes without them, affluent women increasingly tied their sense of self-worth to the non-economically productive aspects of their lives—to their roles as wives, hostesses, and, especially, mo
thers.

  The Victorian enshrinement of motherhood came to pass, in part, because of the equally disconcerting effect that capitalism had on the male sex role. During the colonial era farmers, artisans, and merchants alike had tended to work at home and were hardly ever out of earshot of their wives and children. But by the early 1800s ever greater numbers of men—manufacturers, merchants, and bankers as well as their employees—were spending their days away from home. As a result, they could no longer perform one of the most essential duties allotted them under Puritan tradition: the religious and moral instruction of their children. When “economically superfluous” upper-class women quite naturally stepped into the breach, prevailing notions of child-rearing, and of the nature of children themselves, were radically transformed.

  John Locke may have dealt the concept of infant damnation a mortal blow with his assertion that the child is, at birth, a tabula rasa, or blank slate, on which character is written by experience, but we owe our notion that children are innocent at birth primarily to Romanticism.

  To Romantic philosophers and writers, civilization was a corruptive process that despoiled the soul’s natural purity just as the products of civilization (smoke-belching, filth-oozing cities and factories) despoiled nature itself. Not only was the child’s soul still nearly as it had been created by God (“Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” proclaimed Wordsworth), but the child’s natural character was seen as more Christian, at least when childish ignorance was construed as innocence, weakness as gentleness, and dependence as love. Under the influence of such notions, children gained an utterly unprecedented stature in literature during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: portrayed as holy innocents by such writers as William Blake and William Wordsworth, and as victims, again by Blake, and victim-heroes in the novels of Charles Dickens.

  This beatification of children came to pass for many reasons, one of which was Victorian culture’s attempt to make women’s new non-economically productive role more palatable. But it was also encouraged by the Romantic critique of masculinity. Romanticism began as a reaction against that consummately “masculine” virtue—reason—and asserted the superiority of “feminine” virtues such as compassion, intuition, gentleness, introspection, and spontaneity.

  Many Victorians were quite disturbed by the way the new economy redefined men, and not merely because it forced them to abandon their traditional child-rearing responsibilities. As the work of men, especially in the upper classes, became less physical—less a matter of plowing, shearing, hammering, and hauling and more a matter of contracts and balance sheets, stocks and bonds, profit and loss—it was harder to see such work as dignified, God-sanctioned labor and to separate it from simple greed. Disturbed by what they saw as an ever more avaricious, ugly, and unnatural world wrought by men, Victorians found refuge in the image of the home as a feminine preserve, and of mothers as the protectors of innocent, lamblike children. As one early-nineteenth-century minister put it:

  I believe that if Christianity should be compelled to flee from the mansions of the great, the academies of the philosophers, the halls of the legislators, or the throng of busy men, we should find her last and purest retreat with woman at the fireside; her last altar would be the female heart; her last audience would be the children gathered around the knees of the mother.13

  The early Victorian middle- and upper-middle-class mother was helped to take on her new responsibilities by a new genre of literature: the mother’s guide. These books portrayed raising children as the consummate fulfillment of femininity and as critical to the survival of a new nation. The Mother’s Book by Lydia Maria Child (who is now best known as the author of “Over the River and Through the Woods”) was dedicated to “American mothers on whose intelligence and discretion the safety and prosperity of our Republic so much depend.” And Lydia H. Sigourney, in her Letters to Mothers, maintained that “the mother, kneeling by the cradle-bed, hath her hand upon the ark of a nation.”14

  The authors of these guides had abandoned the harsh rhetoric of earlier generations. In none of them are mothers told that their children are “better whipped than damned,” as Cotton Mather had warned. None of these authors echo John Robinson’s declaration that children’s “stoutness of mind, arising from natural pride . . . must . . . be broken and beaten down.” Rather, mothers were repeatedly instructed to be gentle and affectionate with their children, and not to expect too much of them. In Hints for the Improvement of Early Education and Nursery Discipline, Mrs. Louisa Gurney Hoare presents nature as a guide rather than as something needing correction:

  The minds of children, as their bodies, are not to be forced, we are to follow the leading of nature—“to go her pace”—. . . it is to be remembered that nature may be cramped or forced, rather than corrected and improved; and that, in every doubtful case, it is wise to incline to the lenient, rather than to the severe side of the question; because an excess of freedom is safer than too much restraint.15

  These authors also cast aside the Puritan emphasis on sermons and precepts as the most effective means of moral instruction. Rather, as a Mrs. Barbauld says in an epigraph to Child’s book: “Do you ask what will educate your son? Your example will educate him; your conversation; the business he sees you transact; the likings and dislikings you express,—these will educate him—the society you live in will educate him.”16

  Also, far from counseling mothers to restrain their love for their children or to guard themselves against the seduction of a “pleasing face,” these authors generally shared Lydia Sigourney’s view: “To love children, is the dictate of our nature. Apart from the promptings of kindred blood, it is a spontaneous tribute to their helplessness, their innocence, or their beauty. The total absence of this love induces a suspicion that the heart is not right.”17

  For the most part, however, these authors still did not see love in the modern sense, as beneficial in and of itself. Love’s virtue was primarily instrumental: a mother’s love for her child was what enabled her to give so much of herself, and a child’s love of his or her mother was what made the child want to follow the mother’s example and advice. Only from Lydia Maria Child do we hear anything that approaches our present era’s conviction of the supreme importance of love, but interestingly, not until a decade after the publication of her Mother’s Book:

  “What shall be our reward,” says Swedenborg, “for loving our neighbor as ourselves in this life? That when we become angels, we shall be enabled to love him better than ourselves.” . . . A mother’s love has the same angelic character; more completely unselfish, but lacking in the charm of perfect reciprocity. The cure for all the ills and wrongs, the cares, the sorrows, and the crimes of humanity, all lie in that one word, LOVE.18

  However modern much of the advice of these mother’s guides was, their philosophy retained the strong influence of the Puritan forefathers in one significant aspect. A glance at the table of contents of modern child-rearing guides by Dr. Spock or Penelope Leach shows that they are primarily compendiums of technical advice about diapering, feeding, and recognizing and managing chicken pox, whooping cough, and other childhood diseases. Although the mother’s guides of the early nineteenth century also contained such advice, their authors primarily intended them as handbooks for moral instruction. Catharine Beecher’s popular mother’s guide was even called The Moral Instructor. A simple list of the chapter headings of Mrs. Hoare’s Hints for the Improvement . . . gives the clearest indication of how important the inculcation of morality was to early Victorians:

  General Principles of Education

  Truth and Sincerity

  Authority and Obedience

  Rewards and Punishments, Praise and Blame

  Temper

  Justice

  Harmony, Generosity &c.

  Fearfulness and Fortitude Independence

  Industry, Perseverance, and Attention

  Vanity and Affectation

  Delicacy

  Manners and Order
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br />   Religious Instruction and Religious Habits

  Religious Habits

  None of these titles would have seemed out of place in a Puritan father’s guide of a century before, nor much of the advice in the text that followed. Industry and frugality were as strongly recommended as ever. Lydia Maria Child told her readers: “As far as possible keep a child always employed—either sewing or knitting, or reading, or playing, or studying, or walking.”19 Catharine Beecher said: “It is sinful to waste money or any kind of property.” And: “Any amusement is a sinful waste of time that does not prepare us for a better discharge of duty.”20

  Clichés of the “idle poor” aside, idleness has always been a sin more likely to be indulged by the rich, and it must have been of particular concern to these newly leisured mothers of children whom wealth had also freed from the need to work. Likewise, these women—who, along with their children, were more dependent on their husbands than any of their ancestors were likely to have been—must have been particularly sensitive about the “sin” of dependence. Child’s pronouncements on this evil could hardly be more grave: “Children should be brought up with a dread of being dependent on others.”21