Orphan Trains

by Stephen O'Connor

  The Morrow family’s experience was typical. Johnny was subjected to an intense campaign promoting western migration—a campaign he ended up abetting in his own writing—but no one at the CAS ever thought the worse of him for choosing not to ride the orphan trains. On the contrary, every reference in CAS records to Johnny is radiant with affection and respect. And likewise, no one at the CAS decided what should happen to Johnny’s siblings as their home life became intolerable or they got into trouble on the streets. It was Johnny himself who decided—as de facto head of the family—to put his siblings, one by one, on orphan trains. And when Johnny went out to Iowa and found that Willie had not remained with his original placement but had traveled on his own from employer to employer and state to state, going as far away as Wisconsin, Johnny never saw this as a failure of the Children’s Aid Society. On the contrary, Willie had been doing precisely what the Emigration Plan was primarily designed for: he had been trying to take advantage of the supposedly greater opportunities open to him in the West—something he could never have done had he been required to stay with his original, less than satisfactory employer. Thus, when Willie returned to New Haven with Johnny, it was the West that had failed, not the orphan trains.

  And no one at the CAS seems to have seen anything particularly worrisome in Willie’s case. Although the CAS record keeper was clearly perturbed that Johnny had “smuggled” his brother home, his or her account of Willie’s travels from placement to placement across four western states includes no harsher comments than “doing well” and “getting along finely.”6 A similar complacency colors John Jackson’s record-book entry. His original employer, James DeHaven, seems to have felt no shame in reporting that John had grown “dissatisfied” on his farm and had left to work for a neighbor. He claimed to still “like” John and to be in touch with him. And the CAS seems to have found nothing about the situation that merited investigation or even concern.7 Drifting was a perfectly normal and acceptable consequence of the Emigration Plan as actually managed by the CAS, if not in how the CAS presented the program to the public

  Georgia G. Ralph would have placed these two cases in her “unfavorable” category, but this was clearly not the way CAS workers viewed them. With all of Brace’s rhetoric about children finding better families and homes, the CAS workers well understood that a placement might succeed even if it was not permanent, and that even children had a right to determine their own lives. CAS workers also understood that transportation west did not diminish children’s obligations or bonds to their birth families. The record books from the early decades of the Emigration Plan commonly mention that a child returned to New York “to care for mother,” or because “the family’s situation improved.” Neither the record keepers nor the employers seem to find anything improper about this. In their autobiographical writings, in fact, some orphan train riders mention that their employers paid for their transportation home. Bellingham finds only one case in which a birth parent was prevented from retrieving his or her child, and only a handful of cases in which the society or the child’s employer even attempted to prevent retrieval by birth parents.8 The records also show almost no evidence of children being taken directly from unwilling parents, although there are countless cases of the CAS not bothering to contact the parents of children who came to their offices on their own, or not bothering to substantiate children’s claims to be orphans. (Again, Johnny Morrow’s and John Jackson’s cases are perfect examples.)

  The Emigration Plan had many grievous faults, in particular its failure to provide adequate screening of and assistance to foster parents and employers, adequate monitoring and supervision of placements, and adequate help to birth families so that they could remain intact. But the program also provided children with many real and important benefits. At a time when it was necessary for poor children to work, the Emigration Plan got children jobs, and at a time when even very young children would travel great distances to find work, the CAS not only provided them with free transportation but, if things did not work out with one employer, sent them a ticket to another or back to New York. The Emigration Plan also helped runaways escape difficult or abusive families. Like orphanages, the orphan trains provided a service to parents who temporarily or permanently were unable to care for their children—although it was certainly more difficult to retrieve a child from out west than from a New York orphanage. For children who truly needed new and decent families, the orphan trains offered the chance, although by no means the certainty, of finding such families. The orphan trains also gave homeless children an alternative to jails, juvenile asylums, and traditional indentured servitude. And finally, the CAS treated poor children (if not their parents) with more respect, and had more faith in their capabilities, fundamental goodness, and future prospects, than any other organization that preceded them—as well as many that followed. And the orphan trains represented the very pinnacle of the Children’s Aid Society’s optimism.

  In the first circular by which Charles Loring Brace announced to the world the existence of his new organization he made sure to assert: “We do not propose in any way to conflict with existing Asylums and Institutions, but to render them a hearty cooperation, and, at the same time, to fill a gap, which of necessity, they have all left.”9 Although it may have been politically wise for Brace to avoid presenting his fledgling effort as competition for the city’s biggest and very well established institutions for the management of street children, his assertion was almost entirely disingenuous. Not only would the CAS compete directly with the New York Juvenile Asylum and the House of Refuge for a never very substantial pool of tax money and charitable contributions, but Brace stood firmly on the opposite side of a philosophical fence from the managers of the two institutions. This disagreement did not consist only of differing opinions about the effectiveness of caring for children in large groups, or about subjecting them to military-style discipline, but extended all the way down to the most fundamental understanding of heart, mind, and soul.

  Brace was a proponent of a decidedly optimistic view of human nature. He saw human beings as fundamentally good, and evil as largely exterior to our essential character. Although Brace certainly acknowledged the role of biological inheritance in behavior, he believed that moral character was shaped primarily by the environment. The vast majority of children raised in decent homes and coherent communities, he believed, tended to grow into good men and women. This belief provided the whole rationale for the Emigration Plan. All human beings, under all circumstances, had the potential to do evil, but the general tendency was nevertheless very much in the direction of virtue—how else could a just, all-knowing, and father-like God arrange things?

  The asylums, juvenile prisons, and much of the legal establishment took a decidedly more pessimistic view of human nature, seeing people—especially the poor—as, if not intrinsically evil, at least having a strong tendency toward wrongdoing, a tendency that could be restrained only by rigid discipline and unequivocal punishment. Much of the most ferocious criticism that the orphan trains were to receive during Brace’s lifetime came from adherents of this pessimistic view of human nature. To their minds, the children of the poor were strongly disposed to be criminal by birth and needed rough treatment to be set on the straight and narrow.

  As shall be seen, because Brace rejected outright any criticism based on this pessimistic view of human nature, the CAS made only the most grudging and superficial accommodations to it. Thus, the criticism persisted in various forms well into the twentieth century and ultimately made the operation of the orphan trains legally impossible. But these legal obstacles did not arise until philosophical objections of a very different order had made them all but unnecessary. Although Brace and his successors would always be resistant to critics who saw poor children as guilty in advance of the fact, they were extremely vulnerable to, and ultimately were most deeply affected by, critics who, like them, saw the children as innocents in need of aid and protection. And it was this friendlier
criticism that ultimately ended the Emigration Plan even before the legal restrictions were fully in effect.

  Animosity between Brace and the directors of congregate care institutions like the Juvenile Asylum and the House of Refuge built up slowly. Outright hostility was initiated by Brace himself in 1857 at the First Convention of Managers and Superintendents of Houses of Refuge and Schools of Reform, which was held in New York City.

  This convention took place during a period of intense turmoil in American cities. The nation was in the midst of a severe recession, and urban crime was rising to unprecedented levels, with murder rates doubling over the previous decade and, by some reports, rising sixfold. All categories of street crime were undergoing similar rises, and a substantial proportion of the perpetrators were juveniles. Mob violence was also rife in poorer neighborhoods. In July 1857 alone, one policeman was killed and several other people were wounded in the Kleindeutschland riot in New York’s German district, and a street fight between a Protestant gang, the Bowery Boys, and a Catholic gang, the Dead Rabbits, resulted in the loss of twelve lives.10

  These were just the sort of circumstances to set off fierce debates between the adherents of optimistic and pessimistic visions of human nature, with the former attributing the violence to the economic and social environment, and the latter blaming the corrupt souls of the perpetrators. In his 1857 annual report, Brace argued forcefully from the optimistic-environmentalist camp:

  Is not this crop of thieves and burglars, of shoulder-hitters and short-boys, of prostitutes and vagrants, of garroters and murderers, the very fruit to be expected from this seed so long being sown? What else was to be looked for? Society hurried on selfishly for its wealth, and left this vast class in its misery and temptation. Now these children arise, and wrest back with bloody and criminal hands what the world was too careless or too selfish to give. The worldliness of the rich, the indifference of all classes to the poor, will always be avenged. Society must act on the highest principles, or its punishment incessantly comes within itself. The neglect of the poor and tempted and criminal is fearfully repaid.11

  Given the prevailing social chaos, juvenile penal institutions ought to have been in a strong position in 1857, but in fact they were very much on the defensive. By the end of the 1850s the belief that children were better cared for in families than institutions had received considerable attention, and many experts on the treatment of dependent and criminal children had come to believe that the “cottage” or “family” system, as innovated by the Rauhe Haus in Germany, was the best model for congregate care. In response to this growing current of opinion, the seventeen institutions represented at the 1857 convention were eager to portray themselves as, in essence, big families—an image that was made ludicrous, however, by the information provided in their own reports.

  The “families” of the institutions attending the convention consisted of, on average, 216 inmates, with the oldest and most influential of these institutions, the New York House of Refuge, having 477 inmates.12 Such figures were simply too much for Brace to resist. Having piloted the CAS through four years of steady growth in prestige, funding, and social service, and, at thirty-one, being as much possessed of drive and enthusiasm as he ever would be, Brace felt no need to tiptoe in front of the competition. In his own address at the conference, he declared,

  We hear, in these Reports from the Institutions, of one person presiding over five hundred children, and it is asserted that he manages this family on the purest parental principles. . . . I hold that it is impossible for a man to feel towards them in any degree as a father feels towards his own offspring. . . . The poor boy in the great house can never become to us like the child of our flesh and blood; in some degree he must be a stranger; and my observation has been, that where you have large numbers of children together, you cannot have that direct sympathy and interest and personal management which make the family so beneficial to children.13

  This criticism, which bore the weight of common sense, was substantially reinforced by the fact that the alternative Brace advocated, his Emigration Plan, was so much cheaper than institutional care. In 1857, for example, the year of the convention, it had cost the House of Refuge $85 per annum to care for each of its 477 inmates, while the CAS sent 742 children into the country for a onetime payment of a mere $10 each.14 In addition, despite the rise in every category of juvenile crime, and perhaps in part because of CAS competition, both the Juvenile Asylum and the House of Refuge had fewer inmates than they were set up to handle and thus were having financial difficulties—a condition that only made them more sensitive to Brace’s charges.

  The congregate care institutions—whom Brace labeled collectively as “the Asylum-Interest”—retaliated forcefully during the next convention, held two years later in 1859. “Shall we take these children as they are brought to us,” asked R. N. Havens of the New York Juvenile Asylum, “thieves, liars, profane swearers, licentious, polluted in body and soul, and put them into your families in that condition?”15 To expect that these “little vagabonds” should be “clasped in the arms of the heads of families and cared for, and protected as their own offspring,” was, Havens maintained, “all very poetical and imaginative” but hardly realistic. “I would have you pluck out the vagabond first, and then let the boy be thus provided with a home, and not before.”16

  To this attack Brace responded with a considerably less rosy image of both the orphan train riders and the families who took them in than was normally featured in CAS literature:

  I do not draw any imaginary picture of a Christian family in the West. I do not suppose that the Christian family there or here is always so wonderful, but I believe that it is the change of circumstances, and the new family and Christian influences bearing upon the child [that reforms him].17

  If there is a good family in the West, that is willing to take in a poor boy from the city, to give him social and Christian instruction, why in God’s name, should they not do it? What if the boy is bad, they know his character and associations. If they are willing, from Christian and business motives (because his labor is useful), to take that child in and train him, why should they not be permitted to do so? If enough families can be found to serve as reformatory institutions, is it not the best and most practical and economical method of reforming these children to put them under the charge of such families?18

  The Juvenile Asylum attempted to defuse the conflict by assigning each of the major New York organizations caring for criminal and dependent children a separate portion of the population. The House of Refuge would take the most serious criminals under fourteen, and the Juvenile Asylum the beggars, vagrants, petty thieves, and other “morally degraded and vicious children.” The CAS would be left only those poor children “who had been measurably well cared for, . . . but who, through the misfortune of parents, stood in need of assistance from the benevolent.”19 In the fullness of his enthusiasm, Brace saw no reason to read this compromise as anything other than a humiliating sop. He responded by cutting the Juvenile Asylum out of the picture entirely, proposing that the House of Refuge care for those boys and girls who had crossed that “narrow line of distinction” from merely destitute or vagrant to truly criminal, and that the CAS handle all the rest, chiefly through its Emigration Plan.20

  As confident as Brace may have appeared at the two conventions, he understood full well that “the Asylum-Interest” would not be the only party accusing him of “scattering poison over the country” as long as he continued to send children west who had not been officially “reformed,” “corrected,” or “purified” through a period of institutional incarceration.21 To head off such criticism, he conducted a not entirely disingenuous but by no means exhaustive or unbiased inquiry into the results of his own work. This inquiry had two parts. One was a series of letters sent to placement committee members, clergymen, law officers, heads of reform schools, and other potentially knowledgeable authorities in the West, asking whether they knew of any CAS children
who had been imprisoned or abused, or who had stolen, run away, returned to New York, or otherwise “turned out badly.” For the second part of the inquiry Brace journeyed west himself during the spring of 1859 to talk to orphan train riders and local authorities.

  Claiming to have “visited personally, and heard directly of, many hundreds of these little creatures,” Brace pronounced in a field journal entry that:

  The results—so far as we could ascertain them—were remarkable, and, unless we reflect on the wonderful influences possible from a Christian home upon a child unused to kindness, they would seem incredible.

  The estimate we formed from a considerable field of observation was, that, out of those sent to the West under fifteen years, not more than two percent, turned out bad; and, even of those from fifteen to eighteen, not more than four percent.

  It was in explaining the foundation of these estimates that Brace first presented the “no news is good news” defense with which he would respond to criticism for most of the remainder of his career: “[I]t may generally be assumed that we hear of the worst cases—that is, of those who commit criminal offenses, or who came under the law—and it is these whom we reckon as the failures.”

  Brace adopted a similar defense in response to accusations that orphan train riders suffered abuse:

  It is also remarkable, as the years pass away, how few cases ever come to the knowledge of the Society, of ill-treatment of these children. The task of distributing them is carried on so publicly by Mr. Tracy, and in connection with such responsible persons, that any case of positive abuse would at once be known and corrected by the community itself.