Orphan Trains

by Stephen O'Connor

  2

  Flood of Humanity

  THE UNITED STATES changed more rapidly during the early nineteenth century than at any other time before or since. To the average citizen the most noticeable change was the rocketing population expansion, particularly in cities. Between 1790 and 1830 the rate of urban population growth was nearly double that of the nation as a whole. Philadelphia more than tripled in size during this period, only to be surpassed as the nation’s most populous city by New York.

  At the time of the first U.S. census in 1790, only 33, 131 people lived in Manhattan. Population increased steadily throughout the first quarter of the nineteenth century, but only began to explode when the Erie Canal was opened in 1826—the year of Brace’s birth—making New York the prime gateway for trade and immigration to the East Coast and the whole of the Midwest. Throughout the remainder of the 1800s nearly 1,000 people a day poured into Manhattan from abroad and all parts of the American continent. By 1848, when Brace went to New York to attend Union Theological Seminary, the city had half a million inhabitants. By 1860 New York’s population would be more than 800,000, and by 1890 it was close to one and a half million.1

  People came to New York to escape famine, oppression, or the law. They were running away from their families or rejoining them. They came to find work, to build reputations, to get rich. Many people who came to the city were only on their way someplace else, to a homestead on the prairie, to California’s gold country, or, conversely, back to Europe. But one way or another, New York’s flagstone and granite sidewalks were filled with people driven by a vision of a better life. It was a city of hope and of hope destroyed, of furious energy and of simple fury.

  Most people who wrote about New York in the nineteenth century found the city’s soul on its grandest and longest street: Broadway, a corridor of three- and four-story brick and limestone buildings, running, in 1848, from Battery Park to Union Square. Here were many of New York’s finest shops, hotels, and theaters; here were City Hall, Trinity Church, Saint Paul’s Chapel, some of the city’s grandest mansions and the enormously popular P. T. Barnum Museum. Here too were the crush and cacophony that even then seemed to typify New York City.

  Carts, cabs, lumbering omnibuses, and grand carriages decked out with uniformed footmen clanked and clattered over Broadway’s rounded cobbles. The air was dense with the curses of draymen, with whiffs of manure and gutter water, with the hoarse cries of newsboys and the singspiel of the corn girls (”Hot corn! Hot corn! Here’s your lily-white corn. All you that’s got money—Poor me that’s got none”). By all accounts the sidewalks of Broadway were as crowded throughout the Victorian era as they are today, with the difference that pedestrians then had to watch out not only for traffic—unregulated, in those pre-stoplight days, by anything other than audacity and dumb luck—but also for stray pigs, which were famous for barreling unexpectedly out of side streets and bowling over anyone in their path.

  According to George Templeton Strong, a conservative lawyer and diarist of mid-nineteenth-century New York, two-thirds of the throng that always crowded Broadway were “whores and blackguards,”2 but the imagination of nineteenth-century commentators was most often captivated by the more elevated segment of the street’s pedestrian traffic, the belles and beaus of high society, as well as the “Byrons of the desk,” who would come to Broadway to show off their finery and look one another over.3 Almost every portrait of New York life during that era contains extended rhapsodies about the gaudy splendor of Broadway’s afternoon and evening promenades. That so young a nation could produce so many silk dresses, white collars, and brightly colored parasols, to say nothing of so much vanity and presumption, seemed almost miraculous to early observers. Broadway was a wholly new phenomenon. There was no street to match it—not anywhere in America, and by some accounts, not anywhere in the world.

  Two blocks east of Broadway and a three-minute walk from City Hall was another wholly new phenomenon, at least for North America, one not nearly so miraculous but no less astounding. This was Five Points, a district named for the pie-slice buildings at the intersection of its four major streets. Five Points was Manhattan’s poorest, most crowded, and most dangerous neighborhood. It had been built on unstable landfill near the start of the century, and by the 1840s most of its two-story buildings were cockeyed with cracked walls and swaybacked roofs. Its streets were bogs in the driest of weathers, buzzing with mosquitoes and flies and stinking of the horse and pig dung that had been worked into the mud by decades of traffic. According to Charles Dickens, who visited Five Points under police protection in 1842, pedestrians who strayed into the district’s maze of back alleys could sink in this fetid stew up to their knees.4

  Five Points was the place where ambition went sour, where people who had endured much found they could endure no more. The only businesses that thrived there were taverns, some of which, run by free blacks and featuring entertainers such as the renowned dancer Juba, were the nineteenth-century equivalent of 1920s Harlem nightclubs. The neighborhood was reputed to be overrun with thugs and thieves and to be home to most of the prostitutes who plied their trade along Broadway and in City Hall Park, as well as in Five Points’ numerous bordellos. The area’s most infamous building, a rambling, ramshackle brick structure called the Old Brewery, was said to have been the site of more murders than any other structure in the city.

  It is hard to imagine today how deeply shocking, even baffling, Five Points was to most Americans, especially during the first half of the nineteenth century. It was not that there had never been violence, drunkenness, or prostitution in the United States, only that such ills had never existed on so vast a scale—a scale that represented not merely an escalation in frequency but a transformation of their very nature. A few country thugs and burglars are a far cry from the powerful gangs that tyrannized Five Points. And a small-town tavern with an entrepreneurial waitress is nothing like block after city block of women, girls, and, presumably, boys offering their bodies to anyone with coins to spare.

  Five Points was also an affront to democracy. Not only had there been no slums in eighteenth-century American cities, but there had been little social segregation. Ben Franklin’s closest neighbors in Philadelphia, for example, had been a plumber, a barrel-maker, and a shopkeeper. Many Americans had thought that the marked stratification of urban society represented by neighborhoods such as Five Points, as well the “vice” and class resentment that flourished within them, were wholly European artifacts, impossible within a democratic republic. And almost everyone believed that these were only temporary aberrations that would clear up as soon as the largely foreign-born poor got over their habits of “idleness” and “dependence.”

  The real causes of the poverty in Five Points, and in the growing slums of other American cities, had a lot less to do with individual moral weakness and a lot more to do with the nation’s coming of age. New York in the nineteenth century was very much like a Third World city today—like Rio de Janeiro or Bombay. Many of New York’s afflictions during that era were those that accompany the transition from a traditional to an industrial economy. They were what happens when the economic foundation of a society changes more rapidly than its cultural habits.

  During the eighteenth century most Americans were farmers, artisans, or shopkeepers who primarily lived in their places of business and “employed” only their own families and maybe an apprentice or two. Work was done when people got around to it. Punctuality was a minor virtue. Profits were shared by the family, and apprentices were given basic necessities, training, and some schooling. In 1750 only 6 percent of New York City’s workforce labored for wages, a proportion that expanded more than fourfold, to 27 percent, over the next one hundred years.5 The expansion of wage labor was encouraged by the development of new industries within the city. There had been no more than a handful of printers and book publishers in New York in 1810, for example, but by 1860 there were 154 such businesses—and they were fairly big operations, emplo
ying, on average, 26 people each. But the rise in wage labor was also the result of individual artisans being driven under by competition from businesses that practiced consolidated production. In 1810 almost all clothing was still made by individual seamstresses and tailors or in the home, or it was imported from England; the U.S. census listed no garment manufacturing companies in New York. But by 1860 there were 398 such companies in the city, employing an average of 67 workers each.6

  Mass production brought down the price of goods and helped make life easier, more comfortable, and even healthier, at least for the upper classes, but these benefits came at a price. The wage laborers who produced these cheaper goods had to contend with the new perils of the mechanized workplace, and with the unsanitary conditions of the crowded neighborhoods where they lived. They also suffered a great deal more financial insecurity than their more economically independent counterparts of an earlier era.

  Artisans and farmers were comparatively self-sufficient. They grew or made much of what they needed to survive, and when times got hard they could compensate to some extent by working a little harder or by lowering prices. Industrial workers, by contrast, were entirely dependent on wages. They had to buy virtually everything they needed, and virtually everything they produced went to their employers. When times got hard, wage laborers could not compensate by working harder, because they would often be out of a job and thus could not work at all. And in cities like New York, where immigration ensured that there were always many more willing workers than jobs, employers had no compunctions about laying people off when business took a bad turn, or even just during seasonal lulls. Working-class Americans were constantly losing their jobs through no fault of their own. Moreover, with no strong unions, pay remained low. At midcentury, when rents for the humblest two-room apartment averaged two to three dollars weekly, wage workers in New York rarely earned more than five dollars a week.7 And during the first half of the century industrial wages tended to fall rather than to rise. In a Philadelphia cotton mill, for example, the pay of hand-loom weavers decreased from one dollar per cut in 1820 to seventy cents in 1833, to only sixty cents in 1840.8 Many workers throughout the 1800s were paid so meagerly that they could not afford to miss a single day on the job. They also had little protection against accident or illness. If one member of a farmer’s or cobbler’s family could not work for some reason, other members could compensate by taking over his or her duties. But there was no way a woman who helped support her family through the needle trades could suddenly take her husband’s place in the ironworks when he was injured or fell ill. The result was that working-class families lived constantly on the edge of destitution. When they fell over that edge, as they often did, they had no choices but begging, the workhouse, or crime.

  Even when both parents were employed, earnings were so meager that many families depended heavily on the income of their children. As late as 1880, working-class children contributed between 28 and 46 percent of household income in two-parent families.9 The littlest children scavenged coal, wood, or rags wherever they could find them. Those six or older might sell newspapers, matches, or flowers on the streets or perform menial tasks in shops or factories. They would also help their mothers by watching younger siblings, keeping house, and doing some of the sewing, hat-making, or other piecework by which women commonly helped support their families. At the start of the 1800s many children, especially in poor families, were indentured or “bound out” until age twenty-one. But by midcentury, when the indenture system had been substantially eroded by wage labor, overwhelmed parents would still often send their children to live with relatives or friends during financial or domestic crises. These informal foster parents commonly expected the children to work in order to “earn their keep.”

  Domestic violence and substance abuse were problems at least as serious during the nineteenth century as they are now—although the “substance” abused was almost exclusively alcohol. The streets of American cities were filled with children who had been forced from their homes or who had simply left when a father became violent or a mother took to drink. And in an era when women frequently died in childbirth and epidemics of cholera and typhoid fever regularly swept American cities—especially in poor, overcrowded, and unsanitary neighborhoods like Five Points—children were much more likely than now to lose one or both parents and often wound up destitute and on the streets.

  Immigration helped swell the number of New York’s street children mainly by adding to the oversupply of willing workers in the city and thus placing a downward pressure on already meager wages. It was also not uncommon, however, during an immigrant family’s short stopover in New York before heading west for a child to wander off on the street and become permanently lost. And in the days before radio transmission made it possible to know in advance exactly when a boat was to dock, parents whose children had followed them from the old country only after they themselves were securely settled sometimes did not hear for hours or even days that the ship bearing their children had arrived—more than long enough for a child to become lost, or worse, in a tumultuous and utterly unfamiliar port city. And finally, parents emigrating west in search of greater opportunity quite often left behind even very young children who had good jobs. Such parents were not necessarily heartless or mercenary; generally they saw themselves as sparing the child from the serious risks and hardship of frontier life. Unfortunately, those young workers often ended up losing their jobs and then, with no income, no home, and no way of rejoining their families, they had to make their way alone out on the streets.

  It is not surprising in an era overwhelmingly inclined to see poverty as a sign of moral failure or of God’s disfavor that the first response of civic authorities to the swelling numbers of vagrant children in American cities should be to treat them as criminals. For the first quarter of the nineteenth century the police routinely rounded up unaccompanied children and threw them into adult prisons and almshouses.

  Not everyone shared this dim view of street children, of course. In 1825 a group of New Yorkers who believed that the incarceration of children was cruel, unfair, and only likely to make them more disposed to criminality founded an institution specifically for juvenile criminals and vagrants: the House of Refuge. As its name implies, this institution, which was soon duplicated in Philadelphia and Boston, was intended to provide children with shelter, food, education, job training, and moral guidance—a worthy program, certainly, but not one that the public was willing to fund. From the beginning, these “refuges” were understaffed by underqualified and underpaid men and women and very soon became as brutal and punitive as the institutions they were intended to replace. Nor did their existence mean that children were no longer being thrown in with adult criminals. As late as 1851 there were still 4,000 inmates under twenty-one years old in New York’s adult prison, 800 of whom were fourteen or younger, and 175 of whom were younger than ten.10 And civic authorities continued to see poor and vagrant children not merely as criminal but sometimes as less than human.

  In 1849 New York’s first police chief, George Matsell, issued a report estimating that 3,000 children lived on the streets of Manhattan. (The other boroughs were not incorporated into the city until 1898, but Brooklyn at least had substantial child vagrancy as well.) Matsell hoped his report would boost support for the newly unified police department, but even such a motive hardly explains the extremity of his language. He portrayed the city as in the midst of a dangerous infestation by “degrading and disgusting . . . almost infants,” who were “addicted to immoralities of the most loathsome description” and whom, he claimed, it was humiliating to recognize as “part and portion of the human family.”11

  Even couched in such absurd rhetoric, Matsell’s estimate of child vagrancy was widely accepted during his day and was far more conservative than the estimates of social reformers, who commonly put the number of vagrant children at 10,000, and sometimes even 30,000 or 40,000.12

  I think I should enjoy studying i
n New York for a year, but not much more. The novelty must wear away then. But now it is the greatest possible relief after study, to take a walk down Broadway and look at the perfect flood of humanity as it sweeps along. Faces and coats of all patterns, bright eyes, whiskers, spectacles, hats, bonnets, caps, all hurrying along in the most apparently inextricable confusion. One would think it a grand gala-day. And it’s rather over powering to think of that rush and whirl being their regular everyday life.

  —Charles Loring Brace13

  Brace came to New York in the fall of 1848 ostensibly to study at Union Theological Seminary but perhaps equally to be with his friends John and Fred Olmsted. John had moved to the city to study medicine with Dr. Willard Parker, and Fred was working a new farm on Staten Island.

  In 1848 the city occupied only the lower quarter of Manhattan Island and petered out into open countryside beyond the Croton Reservoir at Forty-second Street (the present site of the main public library and Bryant Park). “Downtown” was the area around Wall Street, while Greenwich Village was a nearly suburban “uptown.” In those days Union Theological Seminary was located in the Village, a block west of Broadway, on University Place, just above Washington Square.

  John and Charley shared a basement room in a boardinghouse nearby where they were bothered by mosquitoes and the noise of constant pedestrian traffic. Their fellow boarders, who seem to have annoyed Charles almost as much as the mosquitoes, consisted of self-important theological students with bad table manners, music teachers who complained incessantly about the musical tastes of the average American, and snooty schoolteachers who demonstrated their overall superiority through excessively distinct enunciation, as in ri-t-ee-uss-ness-ss.