The reference to the fifth volume of the “Record Book” tells us that, for some reason, when Annie was to be sent west, she was processed as if she had never had anything to do with the CAS. Double- and even triple-entering of children into the record books was fairly common in the early days of the CAS, and makes it quite difficult to track down some children—no doubt for CAS workers in the past as well as for present-day researchers. The bleak entry on page 412 gives no indication that anyone knew Annie was Johnny’s sister, nor that there was already a record started for her:
1857
Nov 18
Ann Eliza Morrow 14 years of age American Protestant Shirt maker and all plain sewing can do housework cant cook or wash has a step-mother at No 707–47 Street can read & write cant pay any part of her fare will work it out.
Once again, we find no explanation of what happened at her previous placement, although there is a nearly illegible scribble reading: “Brought to [or “by”?] Mr. Knight[ly?].”
As it turns out, however, the CAS had recorded an explanation of how Annie came to leave her supposed “good home” in the city, but no one looking at her official record would have had any idea that it existed. It can be found—not insignificantly—in an entry about Johnny from William Colopy Desmond’s CAS office journal:
July 10th 1857.1 was returning from the Boy’s Meeting on Sunday afternoon, and was passing the Seminary, when I was hailed by “Little Johnny,” who was sitting on the steps, enjoying the freshness of the evening in the shade. He was not so pale as when I had before seen him. His features were animated, and his health is evidently improved. He inquired after Mr. Macy very warmly.
“Well how do you get along Johnny?” “Pretty well now—I have given up much study for awhile as I think it is better to make money. I’ll tell you why. When I have gathered some money I can then go in for educating myself—that’s what I am thinking of,” and his countenance grew brighter while he spoke with the gentle voice for which he is so remarkable. “And how are you making money, Johnny? What is the means you use to pile the quarters?” “O, I can do many things—you must know I work as a carpenter—I do all the mending about the seminary. When the furniture is broken, I have my hammer, and my chisel, and my saw. There are a few ways of making a few dimes that I try—Beside those I keep boarders.” “In the seminary?” “Yes, you must know some of the students patronize me very kindly. I want to make money so that I may educate myself.
“I went to see little Annie a few days ago,” continued Johnny. “I went to the woman in-street with whom she lived. I couldn’t rest from thinking of Annie for I was always fonder of Annie than of anybody else. Mrs-met me with a very angry face, and when I asked after little Annie, she burst out crying, and said bitterly, ‘I wish the d- had her before ever I saw her the nasty slut. I have a sad heart on account of her this day.’ I was frightened at this and I cried out, ‘Oh! I hope nothing has happened to poor Annie,’ and she shouted, ‘I wish I could lay my ten fingers on her. I’d pay her for killing my child.’ I trembled all over when I heard her speak this way.
“The woman went to Brooklyn or New Jersey to see some friends, and in her absence, Annie let the child out of her sight, and one of the cars21 ran over her, and she was killed. Annie cleared out, as soon as she heard of this frightful accident, and I was in great trouble about it. I went to the house to look for her for I longed very much to see her, but my troubles were only increased by this step.
“As soon as mother22 saw me she flew at me, and drove me away, calling out to the neighbors all round to have a care of their children; for that I was coming to kidnap them. She would have struck me if I wasn’t quick. A crowd got together, and they looked surprised that a small boy like me should be such a dangerous body. Some of them spoke to me half kindly, half scoldingly, so I got away as quietly as I could. They shan’t have Annie though. I will have her away out of that place, for I din’t want to have the poor girl ruined. I will call on Mr. Macy in a day or two,” he said as I bade him good bye, “to consult with him about it, and to know from him if he has heard anything from my brother. I intend to go West very soon.”23
Annie Morrow’s entries show clearly how haphazard a record-keeping system the Children’s Aid Society had in the early days. Detailed records were kept about certain favorites (like Johnny), whose stories it was thought would provide engaging reading in the society’s annual reports. But even these records were not particularly coherent, since they included only the most entertaining, sad, or inspiring stories about these children and there was no cross-referencing of any sort. Run-of-the-mill children, as Annie had certainly become by her second record, received only cryptic, telegraphic entries that seemed designed to jog the memories of people already concerned with their cases rather than to give new workers a clear sense of what had happened to the child, and what the child needed.
Both of Annie’s entries are, in fact, exceptionally long. The first, with its adoring description of Johnny laying his cheek against Tracy’s, goes on to detail the family’s situation—the father’s drinking and death, and Johnny’s bringing Annie to the society. The second, with its catalog of Annie’s capacities, or lack thereof, is one of several entries in a row made in a handwriting that never appears in the “Record Books” again; all of these entries are equally gloomy and portray the children only as job prospects. Indeed, most of the entries from this era do little more than note how the child came to the CAS (for example, “from Brooklyn,” or, “from Randall’s Island”) before devolving into a list of placements and the responses, if any, to letters.
This system, which assumed that CAS staff would easily remember the most important things about the children whose cases were recorded, was devised by a man who was antiformalist and believed that personal relationships mattered most in charity. It was a system that was already overwhelmed by its fourth year of operation. In 1857, when Annie was sent to Iowa, 741 other children rode the orphan trains and a total of 2,748 children had been placed by the CAS since its founding.24 This volume was way beyond what a staff of twenty (which had already experienced turnover) could be expected to keep track of without detailed records, especially when the workers often had not known much about the children under their care in the first place.
The system was slow to change for a few reasons. First, there was no precedent for detailed record keeping. Prior to the massive population expansion of the nineteenth century, charities had rarely had to deal with such large numbers of people, and those that had done so primarily doled out aid on a case-by-case basis and had not entered into a long-term custodial relationship with their beneficiaries. Like other emerging social work institutions, it took the CAS a while to figure out what information about the children it cared for was truly necessary. When communication and transportation restrictions made itimpossible to micromanage even placements a few miles away, there seemed to be little purpose in keeping track of the vicissitudes of a child’s emotional state. The assumption was that the CAS would intervene only in a crisis; otherwise, it would devote itself to the necessary work it was actually able to do, like finding homes and jobs for more children.
Money entered into the question too. It was hard to justify spending scant funds on a large staff of field agents to gather detailed information when it was not clear that such information was necessary.
And finally, the Children’s Aid Society did not see itself as having a parental or nurturing relationship with its charges. Parenting was the preserve only of birth and foster parents. When an institution tried to be nurturing, it not only would be inefficient but would encourage pauperism and dependency. From the beginning, Brace saw the CAS as simply providing a chance at a better life to independent contractors, no matter how young they might be. The assumption was that if children got into trouble, it was up to them either to contact the CAS or to take care of the problem themselves—often by running away. That was what independence was all about.
The result of all these
beliefs and limitations was an incoherent filing system that was prone, on the one hand, to treat emigrant companies as if they were merely shipments of widgets and, on the other, to include irrelevant anecdotes about endearing brothers and the like. In its inefficiency as much as its sentimentality, the system well served the hard-pressed CAS staff’s need to believe the best about its work.
The reluctance of the record keepers to recognize the significance of the facts they themselves recorded is positively dumbfounding at times. The first notation after Annie’s western placement, for example, was a February 22,1858, report from the Reverend Mr. Townsend stating that Annie’s “employer” represented her as “having taken an unprofitable course.” No explanation was given as to what this “unprofitable course” might have been, or whether Townsend thought there was any merit to the man’s assertion, or what ought to be done about it. The next entry, a month later, said only that Annie was “doing well.” And the next, nine months after that, said that “Anna is at the Home of Industry and much improved.”25 No mention was made of why she had to leave her placement, or why she ended up in what was either an almshouse or juvenile prison. The record keepers were so fixated on writing only good news that they seem incapable of recognizing the obvious fact that orphan train placement was not serving Annie well. And as a result of this blindness, the CAS was less likely both to give Annie the help she really needed and to modify the Emigration Plan so that it served all children better.
The last entry under Annie’s name in volume 5 of the “Record Book” is an utterly noncommittal jotting that on August 28,1861, she was living in Tipton, Iowa. Then, for no clear reason, we are referred back to Annie’s original entry in volume 4 for the final notation in her file: on March 22,1865, Townsend wrote saying that she had married. Despite the fact that the lives of Annie’s own mother and stepmother, to say nothing of thousands of other battered and abandoned women with whom the CAS came into contact, were not significantly improved by marriage, matrimony was always seen as the ultimate proof of success for female orphan train riders.
Johnny did not follow through on his intention of going west for nearly a year. Instead, he moved from New York to New Haven, where he attended public school and lived with a friend from Union Theological Seminary who was studying at Yale’s Divinity School.
By the summer of 1858, however, Johnny had run too short of money to continue his education and decided to make his trip west, both to visit his siblings—especially Willie, whom he had not heard from in nearly nine months—and to raise cash by peddling his wares at a substantial markup to all those affluent and generous farmers he had been reading about in CAS propaganda. Interestingly, he chose to travel with an orphan train party from the Five Points Mission rather than the CAS—which may indicate that he already had an inkling of what would happen when he finally saw his brother.
By accompanying the Five Points party, Johnny was able to get to Chicago for seven dollars—half the regular fare. From Chicago, he traveled one day and one night by train to Iowa City, where the first thing he did was visit Annie. This was during the period when, according to the CAS file, she was “doing well,” but was still with the man who thought she had taken an “unprofitable course.” In his book Johnny confirmed that she was in “a very comfortable home” and, like the CAS file, gave no indication of why she would end up in the House of Industry only six months later.
To find Willie, Johnny had to travel a mile or two out of town to visit the Reverend C. C. Townsend. The house was deep in the woods and not easy to find. When Johnny finally arrived on the doorstep, he was led by a servant into a tiny office where Townsend was sitting at his desk. The Children’s Aid Society’s lone western agent greeted Johnny enthusiastically but gave him the bad news that his brother was no longer with the barber in Iowa City, but 120 miles further west, in what he called “Fort Desmoines.” Despite being the state capital, Des Moines was not yet on a railroad line and could be reached only by a three-day stagecoach ride.
Traveling by stagecoach in the mid-nineteenth century was a lot like tumbling down a bluff inside a trunk. When the roads were not rivers of mud, they were deeply rutted and full of rocks, and the coaches had no real suspension. Wheels were constantly slamming into or out of sudden declivities, and passengers were constantly ramming their heads against the coach’s lightly padded walls. Matters were not helped by the fact that the drivers made frequent stops for refreshment at the taverns arrayed at regular intervals all along the way. Also, the stages did not stop at night, so passengers had somehow to cling onto sleep while periodically being propelled into one another’s laps.
Johnny spent two nights and three full days in the coach. Among his four traveling companions was a Mr. D-, who had heard him tell his life story at the hotel in Chicago and asked him to repeat it for the benefit of their fellow passengers. Johnny agreed with obligatory humility—amplified within his published retelling of substantially the same tale by the assertion that he had succeeded in interesting his companions only because “the driest original thing told to a weary stage-traveller is acceptable even when it would not be elsewhere;—as it helps to while away the time.”
In Des Moines Johnny found out just how little Townsend had known about his brother’s situation. Willie was not living with the man Townsend had sent him to, but this man was able to direct Johnny to his brother’s new abode two miles out of town—a journey that Johnny, lame and carrying his luggage, had to make through heavy rain and deep mud.
When at last Johnny saw Willie, for the first time in two years, he found him “much taller than when I had seen him last, much darker in complexion, and very scantily clothed, showing marks of having had a rough time of it; but he was strong and healthy in appearance.” Willie was now thirteen and, as Johnny put it, had “changed employers a number of times.” He had lived mostly in Iowa, but also in Kansas and Wisconsin, and had worked as a “peddler, newsboy, errand-boy, farmer-boy, servant, and then school-boy again.” This list of occupations is quite at variance with how the CAS portrayed the typical orphan train rider’s experience. Only three of his jobs—errand-boy, farmer-boy, and servant—actually required an “employer,” and only the latter two seem likely to have provided Willie with room and board, to say nothing of clothing. And the jobs of newsboy, peddler, and even errand-boy were just the sort of thing Willie had done back home in New York, and by no means justified his removal by the orphan trains. Perhaps this was what he and Johnny were thinking when they decided he should return east.
After making stops at the tailor and shoemaker to improve Willie’s scanty attire, the two brothers went to catch the early stagecoach. Along the way they ran into Mr. D-, who “kindly slipped a dollar into my hand to help me on my journey.” Thanks to heavy rain and a baby who had to have a still stagecoach for a few hours’ nap, the return trip to Iowa City took the better part of four days. From Iowa they journeyed to Canton, Illinois, to visit Janie, telling their story to conductors who rewarded them with free passage.
In his book, Johnny reported that Janie was happy in her new home, and in this case he was probably telling the truth, if for no other reason than that this was the only one of his siblings’ placements he bothered to describe in more than a single euphemistic phrase. “Jane was staying with a nice old lady,” he wrote,
and was treated very kindly. This lady made our visit quite pleasant, by introducing us to a little party of young girls, in whose company we had quite a frolicsome time of it, swinging, singing, picking apples, and engaging in many other sports that carried me back in memory to my early happy home, and furnished many pleasant thoughts to my mind. When the time came to leave this pleasant place, we felt sad, and almost wished that we could take up our abode in Canton with such good friends; but we bid Jane good-bye, . . . leaving her in tears at our departure.
The only disconcerting thing about Janie’s placement is that the CAS seems to have known nothing about it. Her entry in the “Record Books” states on
ly that she had been placed with a Mr. J. S. Langdon in Montrose, Pennsylvania. There is no mention of an old woman, or of Canton, Illinois, or of any further placement, and no indication that any of John Macy’s several letters to her were answered.
Johnny and Willie spent some time in Peoria replenishing their funds by peddling penknives, then went on—once more riding free through the charity of conductors—to Chicago, where they made the acquaintance of a Captain P-and several of his friends. Not only did these people put them up in their homes and show them around the city, but when it was time to go they gave the brothers seventeen dollars and a railroad pass that ensured their free transportation back to New Haven.
On their way home Johnny and Willie passed through New York City and stopped to visit their mother and youngest sibling, Jonathan. No doubt because of a failure to pay her rent, she had moved yet again and was living in a garret on Seventeenth Street between Ninth and Tenth avenues. When the boys opened the door to these digs, their mother was, in Johnny’s words,
lying on the floor of a small room and was covered with an old shawl; we could not make out whether she was drunk or only tired. The only furniture in the room consisted of two chairs and a stove, while the floor was the only sleeping-place. My little brother Jonathan, now five years old, was living so wretchedly in this miserable place—half-fed, and not half-clothed—that I resolved to take him to better quarters.
In essence, Johnny kidnapped yet another of his siblings. But this time he did not take Jonathan to the CAS to be put on an orphan train. Rather, he and Willie bought him clothes and took him to live with them in New Haven.
Orphan Trains Page 19
