Orphan Trains

by Stephen O'Connor

  By nine the morning papers were generally all gone, and the newsboy could retire to a basement saloon for coffee and pancakes—a deduction of nine cents from his morning’s profit. After breakfast he would hurry to the ferry slips, where he might make another fifteen or twenty cents carrying passengers’ suitcases—although twelve cents of this profit would most likely go to a lunch of corned beef and cabbage or a six-cent steak and a cup of coffee. Then, after lunch, he would be off to buy a supply of evening papers, which might yield him another twenty-eight cents in profit. Once again, twelve cents of this would go to his supper, and then perhaps another twelve for a seat at the theater—leaving him, at the end of his day, maybe thirty-one cents richer than he had been when he got up in the morning. If he chose, as many newsboys did, to spend his evening at a bar or a gambling den, then he might easily use up all of his profits and more. A bed on the second floor of an oyster saloon would cost him a quarter—but if he could not afford it, or just wanted to hang on to his money, then it was back to the stable loft or ragman’s cart.7

  More than any other variety of street child, the newsboys embodied those characteristics that Brace—and many of his era—most admired. They were independent, hardworking, and, of necessity, frugal with their scant earnings. Many of them were also charming and funny salesmen who sometimes showed glints of real intelligence. When Brace talked about the slums producing America’s hardiest stock, he was primarily thinking of the newsboys. So it was natural when he set about trying to “aid” the children of New York City that this should be the population he would give special attention to.

  Brace clearly had the idea for the Newsboys’ Lodging House even before the foundation of the CAS, perhaps as early as when he toured the country pastor’s lodging houses in Germany. During his first weeks on the job he sounded out a friend at the New York Tribune about the possibility of the paper contributing a space in which to establish the lodging house. But in the end, perhaps fittingly, it was the New York Sun that contributed the space—a loft atop its offices on the corner of Fulton and Nassau streets.

  Brace opened the first Newsboys’ Lodging House in March 1854, just after the society’s anniversary. This new facility had some two score beds, a large washroom, a dining hall that could be converted into a school room, an office and private suite for the superintendent and his assistants, and a reading room where residents, at their leisure, could peruse newspapers, the Bible, and other publications. During its first year 408 boys spent an average of sixteen nights at the lodging house. In 1858 the CAS opened a new lodging house on Park Place that had 250 beds and sheltered 3,000 boys for an average stay of five nights during its first year.8 And in 1862 the first Girls’ Lodging House opened on Canal Street, sheltering 400 girls for an average of ten nights each.9

  Admission to the lodging houses was not free. Residents had to pay six cents for a bed and four cents for a meal. (By way of comparison, the cheapest and most unsanitary and unsafe hotels cost seven cents a night.) These fees helped the lodging house meet expenses, but the main reason for charging them was to preserve what Brace thought of as “the best quality of this class—their sturdy independence.” Giving residents shelter and food without payment would have encouraged them to be lazy and diminished their sense of the necessity of providing for themselves. Brace’s strategy was to treat all CAS beneficiaries as “independent little dealers, and give them nothing without payment, but at the same time to offer them much more for their money than they could get anyplace else.”10 The residents of the lodging houses paid in pennies; for the children in the industrial schools, workshops, and, later, the orphan trains, payment was made through labor.

  The very first residents of the original Newsboys’ Lodging House knew it was too good to be true. A clean bed for six cents a night, a solid meal for four cents—where was the profit in it? It had to be a mission trap, no doubt about it. The soft-spoken gentleman who ran the lodging house—Mr. C. C. Tracy, a former carpenter—did not seem shrewd enough for any other sort of con. Some of the boys, at least on that opening night, were sure that he was a pushover and that they could get their own back for any sermonizing they might have to endure by turning off the gas for the lights and staging a free-for-all among the wooden bunks in the darkness. As it turned out, at least according to Brace, Tracy was not a pushover of any sort. He got wind of the plot, kept a steady eye on the valves for the gas lights, and placed the ringleaders in a separate room under the guard of a theological student. When one boy tried to start a ruckus during the night by flinging his boot at another, he was summarily lifted out from under his covers, carried downstairs, and thrown out onto the sidewalk, with no choice but to find some alley or cellar in which to escape the wintry chill. Seeing no reason to risk their comfortable beds, the remaining boys apparently spent a peaceful night, only interrupting the quiet with occasional comments like: “I say, Jim, this is rayther better ‘an bummin’—eh?”11

  Although the lodging house may not have been a classic “mission trap,” Tracy and his successor, Charles O’Connor, were constantly reading to residents from the Bible and talking to them about such topics as the Golden Rule and God’s love. Brace himself would come in on Sundays to deliver sermons and have discussions. But true to his original insight, the lodging house attempted moral reform mainly through providing practical services rather than religious exhortation.

  In addition to a bed for the night, six pennies bought residents a bath, hair wash, and, if they had lice, a haircut and treatment with caustic lotions. If their clothes were worn to rags, they got new suits. If they were barefoot, they were given new shoes. Those six pennies also gave vagrant children the right to enjoy the reading room and, in the evenings, to receive a basic education in the three R’s right in the lodging house itself. Most important of all, their modest payment connected them to a network of affluent and generous-spirited men and women who steered them into other CAS programs and were often willing to use their personal influence to get the boys permanent jobs, housing, medical care, advanced education, and, in at least one case, a cowriter and publisher for an autobiography.12

  As Brace tells it, the education component of the lodging house program was inaugurated through a ruse that Tracy devised:

  “Boys,” said he, one morning, “there was a gentleman here this morning, who wanted a boy in an office, at three dollars a week.”

  “My eyes! Let me go, sir!” And—“Me, sir!”

  “But he wanted a boy who could write a good hand.”

  Their countenances fell.

  “Well, now, suppose we have a night-school, and learn to write—what do you say, boys?”

  “Agreed, sir.”

  And so arose our evening school.13

  The Newsboys’ Lodging House offered its residents one more option: the Six-Penny Savings Bank, which, like the lodging house itself, had been inspired by the work of the country pastor whom Brace had visited in Germany. This “bank” was nothing more than a table with several long rows of numbered, coin-sized slots carved into its top. Under each of these slots was a separate compartment big enough to hold at least a month’s worth of savings. Any boy who wanted to use the bank was assigned a number, and he could drop however much money he wanted into the slot bearing that number. None of the money could be removed until the first of every month, when the superintendent would unlock the table top and disburse the coins to the eager depositors, all of whom, according to Brace, would be astonished at how much money they had accumulated. At first depositors would simply get back the money they had put in, but eventually, as an additional enticement, they were paid a generous rate of interest on their money. The purpose of the bank was to give the children “the ‘sense of property,’” Brace said, “and the desire of accumulation, which, economists tell us, is the base of all civilization.”14

  With all of the services offered at the Newsboys’ and Girls’ Lodging Houses, they were, thanks in part to fees paid by their residents, among the cheapes
t of the CAS’s projects: they averaged a $1.17 expenditure per child during their earliest decades, leading Brace to claim that they repaid “their expenses to the public ten times over each year, in preventing the growth of thieves and criminals.”15 In the lodging houses children were, Brace said, “shaped to be honest and industrious citizens; here taught economy, good order; cleanliness, and morality; here Religion brings its powerful influences to bear upon them; and they are sent forth to begin courses of honest livelihood.”16

  5

  Journey to Dowagiac

  ALTHOUGH WE ostensibly have free will, and although we can never be certain exactly what the future will bring, it is still true that anything that has happened, simply because it has happened, was inevitable.

  One way in which the orphan trains appear to have been inevitable is as the consequence of a body of ideas that Brace had been developing at least since that morning in February 1846 when he listened to Horace Bushnell talk about Saints Peter and John. If Brace believed that no conscious attempt to shape a child’s moral nature could compete with the unconscious shaping effected by every person with whom that child came into contact; and if he believed that during the earliest years the most powerful shaper of character was family; and finally, if he believed that many poor children were being corrupted not merely by economic hardship but also by the degenerate families into which they had been born; then getting those children away from their families and into more decent—more properly Christian— homes would seem the best way to help preserve their natural virtue.

  There was also, however, a broader historical inevitability to the orphan trains. They were very much an idea whose time had arrived, and they may well have come into existence—and arguably were coming into existence—without Brace being involved at all.

  Although the CAS habitually portrayed its “Emigration Plan” as a unique revolutionary innovation, the idea had numerous precedents. The most striking of these was the work of the Children’s Mission to the Children of the Destitute in Boston. Beginning in 1850, the mission sent quarterly parties of thirty or forty destitute children by train to western New England and the near Midwest to be indentured to local farmers and merchants. Brace certainly knew about these trains, and they may even have been his main inspiration: the mission’s original president, John Earl Williams, moved to New York in 1851 and was a founding member of the CAS. An even earlier precedent was set by a New York antiprostitution group, the American Female Guardian Society, which, beginning in 1847, found single mothers with children positions as domestics in rural homes. There were also foreign precedents: a German charity, “The Friends in Need,” placed vagrant city children with country families. Brace also knew about this organization, having visited it during his European tour.1 The only antecedent Brace ever acknowledged publicly was the French practice of placing abandoned and destitute infants with rural wet nurses, who often ended up adopting them.2

  The most significant antecedent of all, however, not only for Brace’s orphan trains but also for both of the earlier American “placing out” efforts, was simply the indenture system. Indenture even had a long history of being used for the reform and removal of undesirable or potentially criminal children. Beginning in the seventeenth century, the British routinely gathered up—or kidnapped—poor children from the slums of London and sent them to the colonies to be bound servants. For much of that same period American commissioners of the poor had sought to “reform” destitute children by placing them in supposedly “respectable” homes at great distances from their depraved parents. The Philadelphia House of Refuge, where John Jackson had been incarcerated, commonly indentured boys to sea captains and had even placed one child as far away as Peru.

  By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the indenture system was in its final phase, having succumbed, on the one hand, to the looser employer-employee ties fostered by wage labor and the market economy, and, on the other, to changing attitudes toward children and—under the influence of abolitionism—bonded servitude itself. In a way, the orphan trains were an attempt to modify an increasingly outmoded system, or at least to rescue that system’s best elements.

  Under the standard indenture agreement, a child was “bound,” generally until the age of twenty-one, to a master who, in exchange for labor, was expected to train the child in the “art and mystery” of his craft and to provide adequate food, clothing, shelter, and a “common” education. At the termination of the indenture, the master was also supposed to give the apprentice a suit of clothes and often a bit of money and a Bible.

  The agreement between the CAS and prospective families was identical in its general outline but differed in ways designed to give the child more freedom and protection. The most important difference was that orphan train riders were not “bound” to the families they went to live with. Unless the child was adopted by the new family, the CAS or the child’s birth parents retained guardianship. Also, the relationship between the child and the family could be dissolved at any time if either party was dissatisfied, and the CAS would attempt to find the child a new placement and arrange for the child’s transportation, either to that new placement or back to New York City. And finally, the head of the family with which the child was placed was not the child’s “master” but his or her “employer.” This did not mean that the child was paid wages—although many children, especially the older boys, were in fact paid for their labors. The term was testimony to the looser nature of the placement, by comparison to indenture, and to the legal equality of the two parties. “Employer” also implied, of course, that the child was still expected to work, as a farmhand, domestic, or in some other capacity. But the relationship was not meant to be a cold exchange of labor for basic necessities. From the beginning the ideal consummation of any placement was held to be the child’s incorporation into the family.

  Brace’s reinvention of indenture was, however, only one of many ways in which American society was struggling to preserve this ancient and ubiquitous institution. Indenture was nothing like an outmoded profession—blacksmithing, for example—that could disappear without a trace in a single generation. It was an essential component of American family and social organization. Long after the notion of bonded servitude (at least of noncriminal whites) had become intolerable in a democratic republic, long after payment only in room, board, and on-the-job training had come to seem exploitative and unnatural, and even long after the legal apparatus of indenture—the contracts, penalties, and terminology—had fallen into neglect, there were still families that needed work done they were unwilling to do themselves, and there were still parents who could not afford or did not want to raise their children to adulthood, and there were still adolescents who could not bear to remain in the homes in which they had been born. Throughout the Victorian era and well into the twentieth century aspects of indenture survived as a social safety valve, as a source of cheap labor, and, most important of all, as a set of assumptions about the obligations of family, of adults and children, and of the rich and the poor. By looking closely at these assumptions, we can see not only yet another way in which the orphan trains were inevitable, but how they could also seem natural, normal, and good.

  Little Orphan Annie has come to our house to stay

  To wash the dinner dishes up

  And brush the crumbs away,

  To shoo the chickens off the porch

  And dust the hearth and sweep,

  To make the fires, bake the bread

  And earn her board and keep.

  —James Whitcomb Riley

  Critics of the instability of modern family life are often nostalgic for the Victorian family—or for what is really an anachronistic variation of the 1950s family, but without that edge of postwar anxiety that all too soon gave rise to the social revolutions of the 1960s. There is no anxiety in the idealized Victorian family. Father is resolutely upright, Mother dutiful and content, the children bound inseparably to their parents by love and respect. This family i
s commonly pictured as living in a white clapboard farmhouse, or in a tall “Victorian” townhouse. In the former setting, when the family is imagined eating lunch, there might be a few extra young men—farmhands—sitting at the long kitchen table. In the latter setting, while the family sups at a mahogany table decked with silver, china, linen, and crystal, a young woman, usually dressed in black with a white apron—the maid—might be seen peeking out of the kitchen doorway.

  What is left out of this ideal image is the exact relationship between the family and those extra members of the household. Presumably the maid and the farmhands were employees, but what was it really like for employers and employees to live together 24 hours a day, 365 days a year? The idealized image of the Victorian family cannot contain such information given that the main purpose of the image is to define ideals for our own very different families. We thus tend to misunderstand the Victorian family, and in particular to underplay its elasticity in terms of its capacity both for incorporating others—kin and strangers—and for dispensing with its own offspring.

  At any given moment, between 20 and 30 percent of nineteenth-century rural American households contained servants, relatives, and children who were not a part of the nuclear family.3 And since many of these extra inhabitants were living with the family only for short periods, over time a much larger percentage of households were “augmented” by outsiders whose various relationships to the family (employee, child, charity case, servant) were by no means mutually exclusive. James Whitcomb Riley’s Little Orphan Annie may well have been a poor, parentless girl needing work, or even an orphan train rider, but she could just as well have been an orphaned niece who would have been expected, with all of the alacrity expressed in Riley’s poem, to pay for her aunt and uncle’s generosity by essentially becoming a servant. And while most servants were employees in a much more straightforward fashion, they were also often children and to some extent would be subject to parenting by their “employers.”