Orphan Trains

by Stephen O'Connor

  As one of Pease’s visitors, Brace got his first glimpses of the home lives of the women and men he had ministered to on Blackwell’s Island. He climbed absolutely lightless staircases, littered with garbage and stinking from spilled chamber pots, to garret rooms where a tubercular mother might be shivering under a heap of rags and old coats while her emaciated children sat silently in a corner, an otherworldly emptiness in their eyes. He descended into the basement warrens of divided and subdivided “apartments” where families of ten or twelve shared one airless room dense with coal fumes and body odors. Here adolescent girls had to conduct all their most private duties in full view of their fathers and brothers, and often of other male relatives or family friends—a situation that Brace thought was sure to wear off every vestige of the girls’ modesty and make “unnatural crimes” all but inevitable. He entered the maze of alleys and catwalks linking dense villages of tumbledown shanties in the yards behind the brick or clapboard street-fronting houses. There he found free blacks and runaway slaves living in windowless rooms with no light or heat, iron-faced mothers cradling their dying babies, and old men with stinking sores on their legs, their scalps crawling with lice. And in Five Points’ countless “groceries” he met women buying bottles of gin to console themselves because their men had run off to sea or to other women, and boys with the gruff manners of grown men gathered around billiard tables, laying bets on one another’s skill and luck. On the streets in front of these shops equally precocious girls offered to sell him flowers and made it known—by somber glances—that they were willing to sell much more.

  To all of these people Brace talked about hope and decency and God’s love and the great promises held out by the American Republic to anyone with a little education, a marketable skill, and the willingness to work. Then he would return home so exhausted and depressed that all he could do was throw himself down on the rug in front of his fire. Years later he would describe his labors with the mission as “Sisyphus-like work [that] soon discouraged all who engaged in it.” And he would describe Louis Pease as “heroic,” but only “one man against a sea of crime. The waves soon rolled over these enthusiastic and devoted labors, and the waste of misfortune and guilt remained as desolate and hopeless as before.”10

  It is possible that Brace felt the crush of circumstance even more profoundly when he lay on the floor in front of his own fire than when he had flung himself onto his verminous bed in the castle at Gros Wardein. He had been lucky in life. He had grown up in relative economic comfort, received an excellent education, and been blessed with intelligence and phenomenal energy—all of which had given him his almost boundless faith in his own capabilities and made it easy for him to believe in the power of discipline and self-control. On one level the despair of the poor, and the intractability of their manifold problems, must have been all but incomprehensible to so dynamic a character as Brace. But on another level he understood their plight far too well. After all, the great difficulty the poor had in helping themselves, and their sometimes outright refusal to be helped by him, resulted in his own failure. And, by analogy at least, the terrible difficulties of the poor represented the possibility that he too might become deprived by circumstance, that his luck might not hold, that all of his urgent ambitions might come to nothing. This was not a prospect Brace had much tolerance for.

  His frustration and defensive impatience are visible in many of his letters from this time. “The poor become so suspicious,” he wrote to Theodore Parker, “and are naturally so narrow and pig-headed.”11 In a very short time these negative feelings hardened into an animus that never really abated. More than twenty years later, in The Dangerous Classes, his classic semiautobiographical account of his work with the CAS, he could still describe the homes of some of his charges as “paternal piggeries and nasty dens.”12 And in this same book he quoted an unattributed journal entry (possibly his own) without a shadow of disapproval:

  The old story: “No work, no friends, rent to pay, and nothing to do.” The parents squalid, idle, intemperate, and shiftless. There they live, just picking up enough to keep life warm in them; groaning, and begging, and seeking work. There they live, breeding each day pestilence and disease, scattering abroad over the city seeds of fearful sickness—raising a brood of vagrants and harlots—retorting on society its neglect by cursing the bodies and souls of thousands whom they never knew, and who never saw them.13

  But at the same time those very things that most disturbed Brace about urban poverty only made him feel all the more urgently that he must do something to alleviate it, and especially to help that subset of the poor whom he thought most likely to benefit from his efforts: children.

  Sometime during 1852, while Brace was still working at the Five Points Mission, he turned his back on adults. Although The Dangerous Classes is filled with moving and insightful portrayals of the hardships faced by poor men and women, in practical terms Brace was interested in parents only to the degree that they supported his efforts to help their children. He dismissed contemptuously those parents who stood in the way of what he thought were a child’s best interests—including the removal of the child to a “better” home.

  In The Dangerous Classes, Brace described his reason for shifting the focus of his efforts: “It was clear that whatever was done there [at Five Points], must be done in the source and origin of the evil—in prevention, not cure.”14 Working with children was “prevention” because they had not yet been infected by the evils of their environment—so they did not need to be “cured.” But children were also more malleable than their parents and so were more likely to yield to the efforts of their would-be benefactors and at least to appear to have been helped by them. And thus the benefactors were less likely to feel frustrated and that they had failed.

  To some extent this was a familiar social reform strategy by the 1850s. For centuries poor children had been forcefully indentured by civic authorities to remove them from the influence of their “vicious” parents; beginning in the nineteenth century, children had been placed in orphanages, asylums, and houses of refuge for the same reason. Also by midcentury many organizations and movements were attempting to shape the moral development of children in less radical ways. The originators of the Sunday school movement hoped especially to reach the “moral orphans” in poor homes. And Horace Mann, an early advocate of public education, asserted that the beneficent influence of teachers would rescue virtually every public school student from criminality and sin. Indeed, it was partly to ensure this beneficent influence that New York State passed its Truancy Law of 1853, which threatened poor children with incarceration or indenture if they did not attend school or have a job. In Boston the Children’s Mission to the Children of the Destitute, an organization that foreshadowed, if not actually inspired, many of the CAS programs—including the orphan trains—was founded in 1850 to “rescue from vice and degradation the morally exposed children of the city.”15

  Mid-nineteenth-century anxiety about children was fed by a larger concern about the state of American society, especially in cities, many of which were suffering from repeated riots and rising crime. In New York the social disintegration that had seemed to commence with the Astor Place Riot and the cholera epidemic of 1849 had shown no signs of abatement by Brace’s time at the Five Points Mission. Crimes against property rose 50 percent from 1848 through 1852, while convictions for crimes against persons rose 129 percent, with a threefold increase in assaults with intent to kill and a sixfold rise in actual murders. Public anxiety was heightened by the sensational manner in which newspapers reported atypical crimes. The Evening Post, for example, made big play out of a story about a gang of “killers” who, one Sunday morning, took over City Hall Park and “went about stabbing and cutting several persons without the slightest provocation.”16 New Yorkers blamed the turmoil on the usual suspects: the still relentless flood of immigration, the expanding income gap between rich and poor, and what one commentator called “a morbid sympathy for all cr
iminals.”17

  Even as the many members of the Victorian upper classes venerated their own children as holy innocents, they saw poor children—especially street children—as directly implicated in present and future crime waves. As noted at one grand jury proceeding during this era, 80 percent of “the higher grades of felony” complaints were against minors. In his famous report, New York Police Chief George Matsell described the city’s vagrant children as “degrading and disgusting,” while Mayor Ambrose C. Kingsland called them “apt pupils in the school of vice, licentiousness and theft.” Even organizations ostensibly sympathetic to poor children tended to portray them in the most lurid terms. The first annual report of the Children’s Mission to the Children of the Destitute, for example, described sights witnessed by the mission’s chief agent on Boston’s poorer streets:

  . . . scores of boys playing and gambling with props and cents, not only on week-days, but on Sundays; and rum-shops kept open, in defiance of the law, where youths were enticed to almost certain destruction. He has often seen boys from eight to twelve years of age intoxicated, and found that many of the rum-sellers received stolen goods from the boys in payment for the liquor they drank.18

  It was chiefly his attitude toward poor children that distinguished Charles Loring Brace from the other social reformers of his era. Although he thought there were some things truly “dangerous” about this class of children (not only as future rioters and robbers but as voters who might elect presidents out of ignorant rage), Brace was one of the first public activists to recognize their authentic virtues and their tremendous potential for good. He truly liked the children he worked with, but more important, he respected them—especially the boys—as is evident in the following passage from The Dangerous Classes:

  A more light-hearted youngster than the street-boy is not to be found. He is always ready to make fun of his own sufferings, and to “chaff” others. His face is old from exposure and his sheer “struggle for existence”; his clothes flutter in the breeze; and his bare feet peep out from the broken boots. Yet he is merry as a clown, and always ready for the smallest joke, and quick to take “a point” or to return a repartee. His views of life are mainly derived from the more mature opinions of “flash-men,” engine-runners, cock-fighters, pugilists, and pickpockets, whom he occasionally is permitted to look upon with admiration at some select pot-house; while his more ideal pictures of the world about him, and his literary education, come from the low theatres, to which he is passionately attached. His morals are, of course, not of a high order, living, as he does, in a fighting, swearing, stealing, and gambling set. Yet he has his code; he will not get drunk; he pays his debts to other boys, and thinks it dishonorable to sell papers on their beat, and, if they come on his, he administers summary justice by “punching”; he is generous to a fault, and will always divide his last sixpence with a poorer boy. “Life is a strife” with him, and money its reward; and, as bankruptcy means to a street-boy a night on the door-steps without supper, he is sharp and reckless, if he can only earn enough to keep him above water.19

  Idealized as this portrait may be, it nonetheless reflects those qualities that Brace most admired in street children: their humor, their practicality, their strict—if unconventional—code of honor, and, most important, their fierce determination and energy. These two latter qualities were, after all, ones that Brace himself shared, and they must have seemed particularly admirable to him given that they flourished amid conditions that commonly threw him into despair.

  Brace’s use of the phrase “struggle for existence” in his description of the street boy hints at the complexity of his vision of the slums. Like many Victorians, he was an instinctive Darwinist, unconsciously understanding the genetic ramifications of competition and hardship long before the 1859 publication of The Origin of Species. When Brace finally read the book, it struck him as tantamount to divine revelation, the perfect illustration of how God acts on Earth to purify the nature of those creatures He has created in His own image. As Brace put it:

  The action of the great law of “Natural Selection,” in regard to the human race, is always towards temperance and virtue. . . . The vicious and sensual and drunken die earlier, or they have fewer children, or their children are carried off by diseases more frequently, or they themselves are unable to resist or prevent poverty and suffering. As a consequence, in the lowest class, the more self-controlled and virtuous tend constantly to survive, and to prevail in “the struggle for existence,” over the vicious and ungoverned, and to transmit their progeny. The natural drift among the poor is towards virtue.20

  Brace would read The Origin of Species thirteen times during his life.

  As appalled as he may have been by the conditions in Five Points and the other impoverished wards of the city, he believed that these districts where the “struggle for existence” was most fierce bred the most evolutionarily advanced individuals, not just in the city but in the whole nation—or even the world. (The Dangerous Classes contains numerous references to the superiority of American criminals to their European counterparts!) The problem, as Brace saw it, was that the very environment that bred these robust and most characteristically American of Americans often led them to employ their natural abilities in the worst possible manner, with respect to both their own well-being and society’s. The way to save the children of the slums, then, and to allow the nation to benefit from their enormous potential, was to find a way to alter their environment so that their best qualities could thrive and become a boon rather than a curse. All of the projects of the early CAS would be attempts to modify the environment of poor children so as to replace the worst influences exerted on them with more “Christian” ones.

  Brace regarded the children he attempted to help with much of the compassion, pity, condescension, and fear that was common among social reformers of his era, but everything that would be revolutionary in his work—his successes as well as some of his failures—grew out of his unique respect for the inborn capacities of poor children and his belief in their right and ability to manage their own lives.

  The duty at the Five Points Mission that Brace most enjoyed and at which he seems to have most excelled was speaking at the Sunday “Boys’ Meetings.” His success was no mean accomplishment, given that his young audiences had been invited off the street to see, for example, a magic lantern show (a primitive slide projection) featuring the eight wonders of the ancient world only to find themselves subjected to a sermon on sin and salvation. As Brace put it, these meetings were “a kind of chemical test of the gaseous element in the brethren’s brains.” When an earnest theological student tried to win his disappointed audience over with sentimental or vague proclamations, he might be favored with contemptuous cries of “Gas! Gas!” or pelted with stones, or he might see his audience erupt into a spontaneous melee across the tops of the wooden benches.

  As risible and sharp as such audiences could be, they were not unintelligent; nor were they uninterested in speakers who told them things truly worth knowing. “[W]ords which came forth from the depths of a man’s or woman’s heart,” Brace maintained,

  would always touch some hidden chord in theirs. . . . Whenever the speaker could, for a moment only, open the hearts of the little street-rovers to this voice, there was in the wild audience a silence almost painful, and every one instinctively felt, with awe, a mysterious Presence in the humble room, which blessed both those who spake and those who heard.21

  The testimony of several children, as well as surviving copies of his sermons, indicate that Brace was himself one of those speakers to whom at least some of the boys would listen with an almost painful silence. He spoke clearly and frankly to the boys about their loneliness and confusion and about the brutality of their world. But the most successful component of his sermons was his cherished insight that God’s relationship to humankind was not that of stern lawgiver but of a loving father. “I suppose it is very hard for a poor boy to believe at all times, that GOD loves him
,” he told one audience.

  Half-clothed, cold and hungry, sleeping around in boxes, not knowing where he shall get his next meal and utterly without friends, he can hardly imagine that there is some one above him, who truly cares for him and follows and pities him. Perhaps he has had an earthly father who has been a drunkard, and has beaten and ill-treated his boy until he could not bear to live with him, so that he can not understand what a truly kind Heavenly Father can be. And yet, boys, it is just that message that we have come to give you—that God loves you!22

  Brace well understood the limitations of even the most successful boys’ meetings. As he put it in a slightly different context, “Preaching sermons to the prostitute, who has to choose between starvation and the brothel, is of very little use.” If he wanted to attend effectively to the moral and religious needs of poor children, he had first to attend to their material needs. Simple sermonizing also smacked too much of the “formalism” he so despised in American religion. What these children needed was not abstract consolation and persuasion, but exposure to that spontaneous, heartfelt, and deeply authentic Christianity that he had seen in the most ordinary of German homes. As Horace Bushnell had taught him, no overt influence could shape character as effectively as the unconscious influence of truly virtuous people whom one truly wants to please. The only way to really help these desperate and lonely children, Brace thought, was to place them in an environment where their most basic physical needs could be met and their own most healthy and virtuous impulses would make them want to improve themselves, to become the very best men and women they could be.