Orphan Trains

by Stephen O'Connor

  A month or so after touring the Rauhe Haus, Brace visited a country pastor whose philanthropy would also inspire some of his projects in New York. Brace was most impressed by two lodging houses where vagrants were given clean, comfortable, and dry places to stay for a nominal rent. He also was intrigued by a savings bank in which the poor deposited money once a week. At the end of each season their investments were returned to them, not as cash but as food or fuel furnished at wholesale rather than retail prices. What most appealed to Brace about both of these projects was that they required the poor to make some contribution toward the benefits they received, so that their character was not destroyed by becoming dependent on mere charity.

  After Hamburg, Brace moved to Berlin, where he lived for the first four months of 1851, supporting himself by writing for American newspapers such as the Independent and the Christian Union. He wrote to Fred Kingsbury that he thought all of his traveling was making him a “much better man. . . . It makes one love humanity better to meet so many kind-hearted people, and to receive so many entirely unselfish favors and kindness.” He thought that he was becoming more disposed now to “look all around a question, and less and less apt to feel either very strong admiration or contempt at things.” He regretted a certain “loss of earnestness” but felt that he was wiser for being less likely to launch into “unmitigated tirades,” the like of which he believed had “delayed the progress of truth so, especially among the clerical gentry.”41

  Despite the supposed mellowing of his character, Brace expressed many of his most radical and uncompromising opinions during his solitary travels in Europe, his controversial critique of American religion being only one example. In letters home he excoriated his father for publishing an antisocialist article in the Courant, condemned John and Fred Olmsted for not actively opposing the recently passed Fugitive Slave Act, and claimed that he would rather “be sent to Sing Sing for life” than abide by a law that could require him to participate in the apprehension of escaped slaves and their return to their masters in the South.42

  The cause that most engaged his passions, however, was the Hungarian struggle for independence. In March 1848, inspired by the revolution that had just commenced in Paris, the Hungarians had briefly—and vainly—risen up in arms against the Austrians, who had dominated their country since the sixteenth century. The most charismatic of the revolution’s leaders had been Lajos Kossuth. A man very much after Brace’s heart, Kossuth was a dynamic political figure and a brilliant writer and speaker who gained an almost mythic stature not only in his own country but all over Europe and even in the United States. During the summer of 1849, however, the Austrians, with the help of Russian troops, crushed the Hungarian revolution, and Kossuth fled to Turkey, never to return to his native land.

  In the spring of 1851 Brace decided—against the advice of almost everyone who heard of his plans—to crown his European travels by touring Hungary and witnessing firsthand the nation’s enduring underground struggle, which he called “[t]he best effort for freedom this century.”43

  The idea of visiting Hungary had actually been suggested by John Olmsted one grim, wet afternoon when they were tramping a muddy road in England. And it was John who made the visit financially feasible by getting Brace named foreign correspondent for both the Philadelphia Bulletin and the most widely respected of all American newspapers, the New York Tribune, which was edited by Horace Greeley.

  Brace left Germany for Vienna on April 15,1851, and in early May he started down the Danube with an official Austrian government pass allowing him to visit Hungary. Although he saw signs of oppression everywhere, even in the “long line of monotonous willow bushes” he observed on the shore and in “the melancholy pine forest on the hills,” Brace was tremendously excited by his trip—the earliest part of it at least.44

  As in Germany, Brace had no shortage of social invitations. He had taken great care before arriving in the country to acquire plenty of letters of introduction from Hungarians living abroad. And whatever his personal charms, he also had great social cachet merely by virtue of his nationality. Less than seventy-five years after Americans had fought and won their own struggle for independence from a foreign power, they still retained some revolutionary glamour, especially in nations like Hungary that could only aspire to democracy. For many of Brace’s hosts, merely having an American sitting at the dinner table was an act of insurrection, even if not a word was exchanged about politics.

  Brace would not become acutely aware of how thoroughly tyranny could invest even the simplest words and gestures with dire implications until he entered the city of Gros Wardein (now Oradea in Rumania), where a substantial contingent of Austrian troops was stationed. In Budapest, still a well-traveled and cosmopolitan city despite the Austrian crackdown, and in the backroad towns that he had already visited, people had been more or less normal in their conversations with him—even feeling free to talk about the revolution, at least in private. But almost as soon as Brace arrived at Gros Wardein he noticed people cutting off their own jokes midsentence, or interrupting one another with sudden intakes of breath and sharp glances. The city was bustling, even prosperous—but joyless, and he resolved to leave as soon as he could do so without offending his hosts.

  During his first afternoon in the city his host, a Professor C., took him to lunch at a hotel. Partly to impress two men at the next table with the fact that his guest was American, C. asked Brace what he thought of Laszlo Ujhazy, a wealthy Hungarian landowner and republican who had given his fortune to the revolution and then fled to the United States, where he founded a celebrated Utopian colony. Finding something unsettling in the manner of the men at the next table, Brace confined himself to making noncontroversial remarks (“Ujhazy was much respected in America &c”) of the sort that he had heard from almost everyone he had spoken to that day. He was happy when the meal was over and he could leave.45

  The following morning Brace and C. went to visit Gros Wardein’s Austrian governor, who cut off Brace’s greeting by telling C., “This gentleman is under suspicion for not having handed in his pass to the police.”

  Brace tried to explain that he had assumed he had the customary twenty-four hours before turning in his pass. When the governor would not listen, Brace bid him a hasty good-bye and went straight to the police station. There the functionary he dealt with was all smiles and solicitation, explaining that, while he had to hold on to Brace’s pass so that a general could inspect it, there would be no further difficulties and Brace should simply send for the pass that afternoon.

  Some hours later, as Brace was finishing a meal at the home of some Hungarian friends, the door flew open and in walked the chief of police with two gendarmes and a warrant for Brace’s arrest.

  Brace invited the chief to sit down and join him in a plate of strudel, and then, to prove his utter indifference to Austrian authority, he consumed not one but two helpings of the dessert, followed by a cup of coffee and a cigar.

  The police drove Brace back to C.’s estate, informing him along the way that he was being charged with possession of “proclamations.” Not knowing that he was staying at a private home, the police had spent the whole of the previous night searching for him at every hotel and boardinghouse in the city. It was only thanks to his visit to the police station that they had been able to find him.

  When the carriage arrived at C.’s estate, Brace noticed a police officer standing guard beside a bundle of books and writings that had been confiscated from his room. Brace laughed at the thought that anyone might expect to find dangerous political sentiments in his religious “effusions” or affectionate letters to friends—all written in his appallingly illegible hand—but the police were unimpressed. They loaded him and his belongings back into the carriage and took him first to the police barracks, and then to an old castle outside of the city.

  This castle, which dated from the Middle Ages, was a massive turreted structure built around the four sides of a central square. Outside its
walls was a deep fosse (or ditch) crossed by a drawbridge. On the far side of the fosse was a second wall that had crumbled into vine-covered ruins at several places and in others supported the walls of wine and beer shops. During the revolution the castle had been a gun factory for the republican forces, but it had since been transformed into an Austrian state prison for political offenders.

  Two soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets took Brace through the iron gates of the castle and into a hall where he was processed for imprisonment. “Every possible hole and corner was searched in my pockets,” Brace wrote in Hungary in 1851, his account of his travels and imprisonment, “and everything to the last Kreutser, and smallest bit of paper, taken out, and carefully noted down; my watch and tooth-pick being the only things left me. I said not a word during the whole search, though I must say, if there is anything calculated to make a man feel like a felon, it is such a procedure.”

  From this hall he was taken through one dirty cell, in which there were half a dozen prisoners, into another cell, even dirtier, occupied by only two. When Brace asked whether he might not have a better cell, the guard only answered, “It will be part of your experience as a traveler. Gute Nacht!”46 The heavy door slammed, and Brace turned to face his cellmates.

  One was a revolutionary foot soldier who had been convicted for traveling with a false pass, and the other a tailor sentenced to five months for carrying a concealed weapon. The cell they shared was fairly large, built entirely of stone, with weighty arches that met at the center of the ceiling. The only window had been boarded up outside its bars to within a few inches of its lintel. The air in the cell was rank with mildew and the smell of unwashed men—not just Brace’s cellmates but all the state prisoners who had preceded them. When he lay down on his bed, he found it roiling with fleas. By morning his eyes were black from lack of sleep, and he was covered with so many red, itching bites that he seemed to have a ferocious skin disease—which is to say that he looked very like the inhabitants of Blackwell’s Island to whom he had once preached repentance.

  During the weeks of his imprisonment Brace was interrogated daily by four jurists, the leader of whom was a keen-eyed, intellectual-looking man whose official title was “auditor.” Outraged and, as he would discover, sorrowfully naive during his first interrogation, Brace responded to the auditor’s hostile question “What are your objects in Hungary?” by declaring contemptuously,

  I am traveling in Hungary, gentlemen, as I have traveled in other lands, with the purpose of studying the character and manners of the people, and with the particular object of investigating the old political institutions of the Hungarians. There has always been a want of good reports in America, with respect to the old Constitution of this Nation. I wished to see its workings on the spot. My object has been no other than that of a candid investigator.

  As soon as Brace finished this speech he realized not only that his affectation of superior indifference had been entirely laughable given the absolute power these four men had over him, but that by speaking so boldly he had only given them evidence that they could use against him. His reference to the constitution—an early proto-democratic document—had been his biggest error, since it had been by this constitution that Kossuth and his allies had justified all of their claims to independence, great and small, including the revolution.

  “We do not believe your account, sir,” the auditor stated with a weary finality. “We know the sympathy of Americans with these revolutionists here. We know that no American traveler would leave the great routes of travel for such a vague purpose as this. . . . We know your object!” Brace asked for proof, but the auditor only continued:

  Sir, we understand you. We can prove that every one of your acquaintances has some connection or relative among the emigrants in America. We can prove that you are in a wide conspiracy. We understand this route of travel, and these many acquaintances. There is a wide complot here. I have been accustomed to trace plots for many years. I see your object. Speak out openly and confess.

  The evidence that the court had against Brace consisted of two pamphlets about the Hungarian cause: one had a picture of Kossuth as a frontispiece, and on the other someone—not Brace—had inscribed in pencil a quote from Virgil: “Oh! ye who have too sorely suffered, God shall at length bring an end to this too!” The court also claimed to have evidence, which it never divulged, but which could only have consisted of testimony from the two men at the hotel restaurant, that Brace was an agent of Ujhazy. And they considered this evidence confirmed when Brace confessed that he had once seen Ujhazy on the sidewalk in New York. The most damning evidence, at least from the auditor’s point of view, was Brace’s carefully accumulated letters of introduction. When he attempted to assert their utter innocence, the auditor begged to differ:

  We understand the countersigns and secret devices of your Democratic Society. You hide a conspiracy under a few words. You will enter a room and only say “Good Morning!” and you can convey at once under those words, some political sign. There is some plot hidden under this introduction. Explain to the court. Your only hope is confession.

  On hearing these absurd assertions, Brace became frightened—so frightened that for a moment he had “that dreamy sense, as if it were not I, but some one else, here in that strange peril”—for he now understood full well that common rationality or standards of evidence would offer him no protection, that even if he made no further mistakes and gave the court nothing to confirm its ridiculous charges, the auditor could still suborn enough witnesses to convict him of anything he wanted.

  Back in his cell, having been informed that his extended imprisonment was all but certain, Brace threw himself down on his stinking and flea-infested bed and, in mounting despair, thought first—characteristically—of his ambition: “Perhaps my LIFE,—all that I had wished and hoped for—all that I had been preparing for, was to end here, to close in this mean, miserable way.”47

  The great benefit of Brace’s imprisonment was that it placed him in intimate contact with the very people he had most wanted to meet: Hungarian revolutionaries. For a couple of hours every morning the cell doors were opened and the prisoners were allowed to mingle freely in the corridor. Half of Brace’s fellow inmates were the “much oppressed” Bauers, or peasants, but there were also “Catholic priests, Protestant clergymen, Jewish Rabbis . . . Poles, Italians, Frenchmen, Magyar noblemen, and Honveds, and Wallachs, and Croats, and Slavonians.” It comes, perhaps, as no surprise that in these assorted enemies of Austrian oppression Brace found yet more reasons to love humanity. “Of course,” he wrote,

  where so many were mere soldiers, there were many thick-headed and self-opinionated, and rude enough. But their noble side was their sympathy with the people, and their real devotion to Freedom. When they spoke of that, their thoughts were grand, and I make no doubt—though some of them had been living there for years—that there was not a man among them who would have bought his freedom on the best estate in Hungary, for a betrayal of their cause.48

  A young Hungarian countess was also imprisoned at the castle. She had been arrested about the same time as Brace and was likewise charged with being an agent of Hungarian exiles. She was also rumored to have been the lover of the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini. Many of Brace’s fellow prisoners assumed, despite his protestations of innocence, that he and the countess were part of the same organization—a notion that Brace, for more than one reason, found rather appealing.

  Whenever he could during those morning sessions when the cell doors were unlocked, Brace would sneak past the guard to a window through which he could peer across the yard into the two small rooms in which the countess had been confined. He would watch her as she sat reading two old grammar texts, which were the only books she was allowed. Often she would come to the window to attend the plants that she kept there. “Poor lady!” he exclaimed in Hungary in 1851. “It seemed to me that she grew paler every day. It was very sad; so young and beautiful—with wonderful accomp
lishments, and a noble heart— to spend her fresh, young years, in that heart crushing place!”49 Often, when she came to her window, Brace would wave through the bars of his own, hoping to catch her eye and to be able to do her some service, but she never looked in his direction.

  Brace was arrested on May 24 and released thirty days later, on June 21— two days after his twenty-fifth birthday. Often he was told that he might never be released. Once it was rumored that he was going to be beaten, or worse, by prison guards. He saw other inmates given savage treatment—chiefly during what were called “street runs,” in which a prisoner would be made to pass between two rows of 150 club-wielding soldiers, who would strike at him with all their might. But Brace was never subjected to physical punishment himself. His suffering consisted entirely of uncertainty, fear, humiliation, searing boredom, and the relentless itch of lice and fleas.

  His release did not come about through any finding of the auditor, but only through the exercise of a superior bureaucratic power. And perhaps somewhat to his chagrin, Brace owed the intervention of that power to a Catholic priest who was being released and agreed to convey a verbal message to the American consul.

  One morning, a fortnight after the priest’s departure, the normally grim and impatient auditor greeted Brace with the good cheer of a host who wants to make amends to his guest for some minor slight on their previous encounter. As Brace sat down, the auditor slid a single sheet across the table and declared, “I have good news for you!” It was a letter from the American consul describing the efforts he had taken on Brace’s behalf and ending with the assertion: “I expect your immediate release.”50 Five days later Brace stood on a balcony overlooking the castle yard, a free man.