He continued:
On this journey . . . we heard of but one instance even of neglect. We visited the lad, and discovered that he had not been schooled as he should, and had sometimes been left alone at night in the lonely log-house. Yet this had roused the feelings of the whole country-side; we removed the boy, amid the tears and protestations of the “father” and “mother,” and put him in another place. As soon as we had left the village, he ran right back to his old place!22
The modern reader cannot help but be taken aback by passages such as these. It is hard to imagine how a man of Brace’s intelligence, moral rectitude, and compassion could have dared to justify his entire life’s work with such weak and—at the very least—self-deceiving arguments. It is true that the CAS “Record Books,” like the records of most child welfare organizations of the era, were so incomplete that they could give him little insight into the true experiences of the children he had placed. But even so, Brace had visited countless tenement basements where he had seen evidence of every sort of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. How could a man who could be so outraged by the parents of slum families remain so apparently innocent of the abuses that occurred unseen in farm kitchens and outbuildings, especially when he had also heard so many children—John Jackson being only one of them—tell of their bestial treatment at the hands of farmers, country shopkeepers, and mechanics?
It is impossible to know exactly what sort of blind spots and evasions might have enabled Brace to carry on his work with so little apparent doubt as to its merit or efficaciousness, but it is important to remember that everything he wrote about the CAS was intended primarily to woo supporters and contributions and did not necessarily represent his honest opinions. In a more considered report written upon his return to New York, Brace’s claims for the Emigration Plan were considerably more modest and sober: “Under any discipline, a certain number will turn out badly; we only claim for this method fewer failures than under any other, and a work much more economical and extensive.”23 What this shows is that Brace was prepared to practice a fairly grim calculus. Like many Americans of his era, he perceived, perhaps with perfect justice, that a staggering number of slum children were living in absolutely desperate conditions. He knew that, especially given the limited funds available for helping the poor, it would be impossible to save every child, and so he considered failure (children suffering abuse in solitude and silence; children running away in fear or homesickness; children whose anger and pain turned inward, driving them to drink, violence, and worse) to be an inevitable component of his humanitarian labors. That he may have knowingly overlooked failures and exaggerated his rates of success does not mean that he did not sincerely believe that his work was thoroughly justified and good.
In any event, Brace emerged the clear victor over “the Asylum-Interest” in the battle of images, especially in his own city. He followed his 1859 report about the “remarkable” results of the Emigration Plan with an 1861 report based on figures provided by the City Prison that showed an 88 percent decline in petty larcenies committed by children under ten over the preceding decade, and a 50 percent decline in vagrancy, even as the population of the city continued to increase.24 Brace presented these figures as evidence of the effectiveness of CAS programs, neglecting to mention that crime had actually risen substantially during most of the 1850s and had only begun to fall as the city’s economy improved in the final years of the decade. But the coup de grâce in Brace’s struggle with the congregate care institutions came with what he termed “indiscreetly” published figures that showed that the longer a child was kept in the House of Refuge or the Juvenile Asylum, the more likely he or she was to commit a crime upon release.25
Even as Brace triumphed over “the Asylum-Interest,” his nation became embroiled in the worst cataclysm of its history, one that he first celebrated as the answer to long-held prayers but that soon caused him deep disillusionment.
Freedom to the slave! The words sound as might the songs of angels amid the curses and groans of battle. We cannot believe them. What! This curse and burning shame at length, after so many years of hopeless prayers and tears to be taken away! . . .
Another result of our final victory must be the full justification of the American Idea. . . . Now, in the hour of our peril . . . we find the foreign-born rising, if possible, with more enthusiasm and patriotic self-devotion to defend the Republic than our own citizens. The brave Irish, the gallant French, the well-drilled Germans, Poles, Hungarians, and English are hurrying to stand by or die for the capital of their country. Henceforth, the blood of the foreign dead on this soil consecrates universal suffrage, while the American nation endures.
—Charles Loring Brace, May 186126
When South Carolinians fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, Brace rejoiced, believing that the now-inevitable war between the North and South was God’s way of enabling the United States finally to fulfill its promise. Only through a crisis as dire as war could patriotic instincts become fervid enough to “override the selfishness which free institutions so rapidly develop” and make a true nation out of many peoples divided by class and ethnicity. And most important, only a war could inspire the leaders of the nation to, at last, end slavery—“the greatest sin which a nation ever committed.”27
Although Brace was only thirty-five at the outbreak of the war, and he publicly lauded “professional men who have abandoned all civil honors to take place as privates,”28 he did not enlist himself—perhaps believing that he could do more good by remaining at his labors in the city, or that he could not abandon his wife and small children. He did, however, rush to aid the cause in more discreet efforts, first as a journalist.
Within two weeks of the shelling of Fort Sumter, Brace went to Washington as a correspondent for the Independent and the New York Times. His first reports from the front primarily concerned the massing of troops to defend the capital and mount an attack on the Confederates.
For the most part Brace painted a flattering portrait of the bravery of Union soldiers and their leaders, but he did write with some concern about a “tide” of drinking, gambling, and swearing and an “unmanly dodging of religious responsibilities” that was running through the army.29 Then, on July 12, 1861, following 30,000 Union troops on their march toward the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, Brace saw action for the first time and described it in a letter to Letitia:
Yesterday I was in a battle. Don’t be frightened; we escaped all right, and I suppose the danger was trifling. We stood on the hill above Bull’s Run, and saw the whole affair, and suddenly had the cannon-balls flying among us. I tell you, the first experience of a round shot, whirring over one’s head, is a sensation. Every one ducks and whirr! they go right over you. A number were killed on our side. I have written a long account for the “Times.” Our men did not act very well, and the enemy were well posted. It was a trap for us. We go to the same point today, and will attack them with a larger force. It was the most exciting day of my life, yesterday, and I could hardly sleep, tired as I was.30
The renewed engagement with the Confederates at Bull Run resulted in a terrible defeat for the Union forces and drove home to northerners that the war would not be won as easily and quickly as so many had expected. Brace’s articles and letters did not again display such complacent optimism about the Union troops or their campaign until the very end of the war. Indeed, the war provided Brace with a series of disappointments, both personal and political.
One of the personal disappointments came to pass when he tried to aid the war effort by joining the Sanitary Commission, an organization devoted to implementing the latest theories about hygiene and disease prevention within the army. The commission was headed by his old friend Frederick Law Olmsted, who had already completed the bulk of his work on Central Park.
Brace and Olmsted had grown distant over the years. Although they would remain friends until Brace’s death, their letters never again exhibited the easy affection and solida
rity of their early correspondence. Olmsted’s response to Brace’s offer to help out at the Sanitary Commission was couched in humor but showed clear hostility:
Dear Charley: I employ three classes, surgeons, nurses, and women—the first and last of two grades, but in neither of either would you yoke. For nurses, I find that any not very sick common soldiers, Yankee, Irish, or German, are better than any volunteers; also mercenaries are better than gratuitous volunteers. I have therefore abandoned volunteers. Don’t want them. Consequently, in the way of business, I don’t want you; for any man without a clearly defined function about the army is a nuisance, and is treated as such. . . . I have seen enough of it, and it is not an entertainment to which I would invite a friend.31
In the end, Brace would do some work for the Sanitary Commission, but primarily as a publicist. His main involvement in the war effort, apart from serving as a correspondent until the summer of 1862, was to work as a chaplain for the Christian Commission, “distributing sherry and spiritual consolation”32 to patients in field hospitals.
Brace’s political disappointments centered on the nation’s failure to achieve that solidarity transcending all boundaries of class and ethnicity that he had considered all but inevitable in the heady days following the shelling of Fort Sumter. Even after the Yankee defeat at Bull Run, Brace had maintained a powerful certainty of the impending “overthrow of slavery and the restoration of liberty.” But once he had experienced battle, he began to conceive of that overthrow in terms that were not merely less celebratory but uncharacteristically brutal:
The smothered indignation of years, now that at length there is a practical vent, bursts forth. If they speak of the subjugation or extermination of the slave holders, as a class, it is not in the spirit of revenge or personal bitterness, but because such seems the Divine Providence or retribution, and because they feel the wrongs done to the helpless and the unbefriended.33
Despite this alleged grim resolve of Divine Providence, the U.S. government seemed decidedly reluctant to make the just and inevitable proclamation of the emancipation of slaves, and the American people, including even some prominent abolitionists, were slow to demand it. Brace’s impatience with anyone not demanding freedom for the slaves was so extreme that he concluded one Independent column by speculating that “a nation whose teachers and priests were such” might deserve “extermination.”34
One of the “teachers” who particularly frustrated Brace was Horace Greeley, a longtime abolitionist and the editor of the New York Tribune, then the most respected paper in the North. When Brace wrote urging that the Tribune be more assiduous in its promotion of emancipation, Greeley responded with advice that Brace could only have found disgraceful:
[T]rust the Divine Disposer . . . to do the needed work, with little help from you or me. If every Abolitionist of three months’ standing were to die to-morrow, the war could not continue two years without ending in (or involving) emancipation. It may be well for the “Tribune,” as you say, to say more on this point. But I doubt that it is well for the cause, and feel sure it is unnecessary.35
Brace’s letters and articles on abolitionism, as well as his avowal of controversial religious and scientific opinions and, especially, his support of “old John Brown,” raised the concern of the new chairman of the CAS board as to his fitness to run the society. In a letter responding to the chairman, William A. Booth, Brace asserted that he strenuously avoided making controversial statements whenever he spoke or wrote as a representative of the CAS, but that he had to be free to speak his mind in all other contexts: “Any other principle would strip an agent of his individuality.”36 Although the relationship between Booth and Brace would never be more than cordial, the chairman seemed to accept Brace’s reasoning and did not interfere with his activities outside the CAS again.
Even as Brace was campaigning for emancipation of slaves, writing on the war, and serving as a chaplain, he was not only still running the CAS but lobbying government on behalf of poor children. In 1862 the CAS opened its first Girls’ Lodging House, and New York City appointed its first two truant officers. Brace had argued for many years that compulsory education was the best means for combating the twin evils of poverty and the exploitation (primarily in factories and mines) of child labor. New York already had a law requiring all children under the age of fourteen to attend school, but no mechanism for enforcing it. It was Brace’s urgent campaigning that finally convinced City Hall to appoint those first two truant officers, with the result that, according to Brace’s daughter, within two months’ time more than 500 former truants had become full-time students.37
Brace’s 1861 assertion that the war would heal the bitter divides between ethnic groups, and in particular that the “brave Irish” were “hurrying to stand by or die for the capital of their country,” was proven sorrowfully inaccurate by the New York draft riots of 1863.
For years New York employers had been playing off African Americans and Irish immigrants against one another to keep wages low. Whenever one group started to get obstreperous, they would be fired and replaced by the other. Thus, many Irish were singularly uninterested in fighting a war for the emancipation of slaves (whom they saw as only more competition) and were outraged in July 1863 when a new law subjected them to a draft for the first time. They were especially indignant over a provision in the law allowing the rich to evade military service by paying $300.
What began as a protest against the draft and Lincoln’s policies soon turned into an attack on the people those policies were thought most to benefit. The rioters went from ransacking draft offices to trashing the homes and places of business of prominent Republicans and abolitionists. Horace Greeley’s office at the New York Tribune was attacked twice. But the worst of the immigrant fury was vented in the “colored” neighborhoods between Five Points and the present-day West Village. At least eleven black men were lynched and horribly mutilated by the rioters, and the Colored Orphan Asylum at Forty-third Street and Fifth Avenue was burned to the ground. During the three days before the Union Army finally quelled the rioters on July 16,105 people were killed—making these riots one of the bloodiest urban disturbances ever to take place in the United States.
Although Brace was horrified by the savagery of the draft riots and feared for the survival of the nation, they provided him with an absolutely irresistible fund-raising opportunity. “The rioter of 1863 is merely the street-boy of 1853 grown up!” he declared in a special circular issued shortly after the riots.
No other fruit from so much ignorance and poverty and heathenism, as exist in the degraded quarters of New York could be expected than such rioters and such mobs. A boy or girl left to drift about on the foul currents of New York street-life, without moral influence, or common education, cunning and ignorant, making a living by all sorts of devices and trickery, exposed to the worst company and the most depraved associations, must inevitably grow up, as by a fixed law, into such young men and women as recently fired dwellings, sacked orphan asylums, and murdered unoffending and Christian men and women for mere brutal thirst of blood.
Although Brace referred to incidents of racist barbarity in this document, he chose to present the riots to his affluent readers and potential contributors as “a grand attack against Property . . . an insurrection of the irresponsible and outcast classes against the well-to-do and the rich.” He concluded with an appeal to guilt, fear, and common sense:
[T]hough great numbers have been saved [by the CAS] during the last ten years, it must be remembered how small the efforts are, compared with the evil, and how little expense and trouble have been incurred by our citizens in comparison with the property in danger from these neglected children, or the vast multitude of the degraded classes.
Many there were, without doubt, engaged in this riot who were simply very poor and ignorant laboring people. Yet we cannot question that the bitterness shown by these against those well-off and rich, would have been much lessened had more been done by the upper
classes to fill up the great gap between them.38
Brace’s implication that the CAS had been working with “great numbers” of the Irish poor who had been responsible for the riots was by no means inaccurate. For most of the nineteenth century the Irish accounted for 20 percent of the orphan train riders and were the largest single ethnic group served by the CAS, apart from the Americans, many of whom were of Irish extraction. The high proportion of Irish on CAS rosters did not mean, however, that the Irish universally welcomed the society’s efforts. Many Irish, and Catholics in general, saw the CAS as a key element in a Protestant plot to destroy their faith.
There had been no significant Roman Catholic presence in New York City until the century of exponential growth that began with the building of the Erie Canal in 1826. By 1865 New York’s 400,000 Catholics made up half of the city’s population and were by far its largest denomination.39 Some of them were Italian, German, and French, but the vast majority of New York Catholics were Irish who had fled the famine in the 1840s, ’50s, and ’60s.
Throughout the famine years the main object of the New York Catholic church was simply to keep up with the explosive growth of its congregation. The deep poverty of most New York Catholics kept the church perpetually short of funds to finance the building of new churches and schools, and all such institutions, once established, tended to operate on the very edge of financial insolvency. Up until the Civil War, apart from an orphanage built in 1817, there were no substantial Catholic urban aid or reform organizations. As a result, when the church’s poorest parishioners needed help, they had no choice but to turn to Protestant charities, which many believed were primarily, if covertly, intended to lure Catholics away from their church. Up until the 1840s even the public schools were run by a semiprivate Protestant society that promoted a markedly anti-Catholic curriculum and insisted on the use of the Protestant King James Bible in class. (It was in fact a dispute between the city and Catholic Bishop John Hughes that led to the removal of the Bible from the classroom and—much to Hughes’s dismay—to the gradual secularization of New York public education.)
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