Charles Loring Brace in 1853, the year he founded the Children’s Aid Society
An orphan train publicity flyer from the 1860s
A card given to foster parents of orphan train riders during the 1890s
An orphan train bound for Texas in 1904
Illustrations commonly used as a frontispiece in Children’s Aid Society annual reports between 1873 and 1890
A cartoon from an 1874 edition of the Irish World newspaper, showing a widely held catholic vision of the nature of the “work of the Children’s Aid Society”
John Brady, the governor of Alaska.
Andrew Burke, the governor of North Dakota, who rode the same orphan train to Indiana as John Brady in 1859
A party of “emigrants” in front of the CAS offices on East 22nd Street, circa 1910. From the left, the adults are Robert L. Neill, Clara Comstock, and Anna Laura Hill, agents of the society.
Charles Loring Brace in the 1880s
8
Almost a Miracle
BRACE’S AMBITIONS for his Emigration Plan were always contradictory. On the one hand, he wanted to provide children with a home, but on the other, he was getting them a job. Rural placement was ostensibly for the children’s benefit, but it was also a way to provide farmers with labor and to “drain” the cities of their “dangerous classes.” Brace had great admiration for orphan train riders’ slum-born drive and resilience, but he wanted to transform them into paragons of middle-class restraint and discipline. And finally, he believed—with more passion than he ever stated publicly—that by removing children from the modern “materialist” city and placing them in good families in the country, he was encouraging the development of a humbler, more old-fashioned, and more Christian morality than that which dominated his ambitious and dynamic era. But at the same time he believed that the hard work and discipline of farm life would turn orphan train riders into future statesmen and captains of industry—which is to say, into some of the most ambitious, materialist, and, as it often turned out, morally corrupt of modern Americans.
This last was a contradiction not simply of Brace’s philosophy but of the entire Victorian era. Even though the pulpits were still dominated by Calvinist notions of human fallibility, much of the rest of society was delirious at the new and, many thought, all but unlimited freedom of individuals to shape their own destinies and of humanity to perfect the world. And so it was no accident that these contradictions determined not only the way the CAS treated orphan train riders but also the roles that at least some of these children would lead in their adult lives—and no one more so, perhaps, than the child whose Horatio Alger rise would turn out to be the Emigration Plan’s single most dramatic success.
John Brady’s early life could hardly be more typical of the stories commonly featured in the Children’s Aid Society annual reports. He was born on May 25, 1848, in a tenement east of Five Points. His parents, James and Catherine, were Irish Catholics who had fled the famine. James was a stevedore and a drunk. Catherine died when John was so young that all he remembered of her were her attempts to keep him from scratching at his smallpox blisters—a futile effort, it would seem, since inflamed blisters would leave him scarred for life.
John’s father beat him. At first the beatings had a semirational justification. He was once punished because he ran off to play on the streets when he had been left to care for his infant stepsister. But after James Brady lost his job, the beatings were motivated mainly by alcoholic rage. When John was eight, he ran away from home, staying for a while with his father’s sister. But he was, in his own words, “a very bad boy, having an abundance of self-will.”1 When his aunt married and moved to Boston, she did not want to take him with her, and so he had no place to live but the streets.
John may have been homeless for as long as a year. Like most street kids, he survived by a mix of begging, thieving, and doing odd jobs. Some days he got his food by pilfering from the Fulton Market. Other times he would go down by the docks early in the morning when the steamboats jettisoned their refuse. He got his best meals when he could pay for them and earned the money by ripping the lead out from around chimneys and selling it at junk shops, or by running errands for the patrons of taverns and saloons. He also garnered pennies by singing Irish ballads on Broadway, Park Row, and other streets heavily trafficked by affluent New Yorkers. And sometimes he would simply hold out a filthy hand.
One night shortly after Christmas in 1857, when John was nine years old, he was standing in front of the Chatham Street Theater hoping to make a meal out of the half-eaten cobs of hot corn that playgoers were apt to cast onto the sidewalk before taking their seats. After a while he grew tired and cold and sat down on a window grate warmed by an updraft from the theater’s basement. The next thing he knew a man was shaking his shoulder and asking whether he wouldn’t like to have three solid meals a day.
In his unpublished autobiography, “Zigzags of a New York Street-boy,” John identified this man as Theodore Roosevelt Sr., the father of the president. But in a letter to Charles Loring Brace, John described him only as “some kind person from your Society.”2
Later in life Brady may well have had an ulterior motive for claiming to have been rescued from the gutter by a president’s father, but Roosevelt did indeed have a long history with the Children’s Aid Society. In 1854 he provided a substantial portion of the original funding for the Newsboys’ Lodging House and was a trustee of the society from 1867 to 1878.3 He also had a tradition of taking his Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners at the lodging house, sometimes with his eldest son and namesake in tow. Given this history, it seems odd that Roosevelt would have recommended that John go, not to the Newsboys’ Lodging House, but to the Nursery Department of the House of Refuge on Randall’s Island. “His voice was so wonderful,” John said in his autobiography, “that he soon won me.”4 Escorted by his rescuer, John went to a nearby police station, where he spent the night. The following morning he was transferred to Randall’s Island.
During his year and a half at the refuge, John acquired a couple of tattoos—a cross on his wrist and a “JB” on his elbow (inscribed by rubbing ash into needle wounds)—and hardened into what he would remain, in many ways, for the rest of his life: a bandy street tough, always ready to win his way with his wit or his fists. Photographs taken of him in old age show that he never lost his back-alley cockiness, and even during the last years of his life he was prone to show his displeasure by calling out, “Put up your dukes!”5
In July 1859, shortly after his eleventh birthday (although, because of a records mistake, John thought he was only ten), an agent from the Children’s Aid Society, H. Friedgen, came to Randall’s Island to talk about the Emigration Plan. Friedgen was not a terribly well-educated man. His letters to Brace are filled with gross spelling and grammatical mistakes. But he was deeply committed to the children, and the day he spoke in front of the Randall’s Island inmates he was filled with an infectious enthusiasm. He concluded his talk by asking, as John wrote to Brace many years later, “how many boys who have no parents would love to have nice homes in the West, where they can drive horses and oxen, and have as many apples and melons as they should wish?”6 John had no idea whether his father was alive or dead, but he was so tempted by those horses and melons that he promptly proclaimed himself an orphan and signed up for a trip west. And since no one at the Children’s Aid Society or, it would seem, the House of Refuge ever bothered to look into his parentage, he left New York on August 2, 1859, with twenty-seven other children and Friedgen, bound for Indiana. Before leaving New York, however, John met Brace, who gave him and the other children in the party personally inscribed Bibles.
During his first day on the train John looked out at the passing rural cabins and houses, most of them separated by wide stretches of unpeopled fields and forests, and began to feel that the country was a terribly large and lonely place. At one point the train passed a grove of trees, each of which had a pile of wood around its base and ton
gues of flame licking at its bark. Knowing nothing of “girdling,” a common land clearance practice, John could only marvel that the scant citizens of this empty land could be so perverse as to set fire to beautiful trees. His tears began to flow and would not stop until he had fallen asleep.
For much of his weeklong journey west he sat beside Andrew Burke, a boy his own age, whom he recognized from the Randall’s Island nursery but had never gotten to know. The two boys had a great deal in common, not only their Irish Catholic backgrounds, their institutionalization, and their shared anxieties and hopes about what would happen to them in their new homes, but also unusual intelligence and determination. They became fast friends on their ride and would stay in touch throughout their lives. Perhaps partly by mutual influence, they would also end up fulfilling startlingly similar destinies.
On the last day of their journey the train stopped at Tipton, Indiana, and John Green, a farmer, judge, and state senator, got on board. During the thirty-mile journey south to Noblesville, Judge Green became curious about the crowd of boisterous young New Yorkers and wandered into the car where they were riding. John Brady would later remember seeing a man standing for some time in the doorway, wearing a dark suit and a soft black hat and holding a cane. As the train pulled into the Noblesville station, however, the man disappeared.
Friedgen took the children off the train and escorted them over to Aunt Jenny Fergusson’s hotel, where they had lunch. While they ate, interested adults were allowed into the dining room to observe them and ask questions. It was at some point during this meal that John saw the man in the dark suit again, looking at him from across the room. Years later Judge Green also described this moment: “It was the most motley crowd of youngsters I ever did see. I decided to take John Brady home with me because I considered him the homeliest, toughest, most unpromising boy in the whole lot. I had a curious desire to see what could be made of such a specimen of humanity.”7
Green had other motives than Henry Higgins-style curiosity for taking the city orphan back to his Tipton farm. His eldest son had left home to run a farm of his own, his next son was on the verge of doing the same, and the judge needed someone trustworthy to keep up the family’s original farm while he attended to his other labors.
Despite an early attempt to milk a bull named Augustus Belmont (after the New York financier), John felt right at home from the moment he came to live with the Greens. Although he never particularly took to farm labor, finding it stultifyingly repetitious, he performed his chores dutifully and won the respect and affection of the entire Green family. It was the judge’s labors outside the farm—in his law office, the courts, and the state capital—that most intrigued John. He also read the literary and philosophical books that the judge kept on a row of shelves in the family sitting room. An entry in the CAS “Record Book” from not long after John’s placement reads: “Mr. John Green writes ‘John Brady is still living with me. He is a very attentive boy to his books, is a good arithmetician and is learning grammar and Algebra. He is posted in national affairs and seems to be disposed to make a man of himself.’”8 After a year on the farm John was enrolled in the local school—where, during his very first week, he demonstrated considerable prowess, both by his academic performance and by knocking the class bully flat on his back.
Although never activists, the Greens were Republicans with abolitionist sympathies. Sometime in 1860 or 1861 they took in an ex-slave named Jim who had come north on the Underground Railroad. John and Jim worked side by side on the farm, the only difference between them being that Jim got paid for his work while John was rewarded by the privilege of quasi-family membership.
In April 1861, near the end of John’s second year with the family, South Carolinians fired on Fort Sumter and the judge’s second son joined the Union Army. Now nearly fourteen, John also wanted to enlist as a drummer boy, but his foster parents would not hear of it. He was too young, the war was too brutal, and besides, he was needed on the farm.
It was obvious, however, that John was not developing much of a taste for farm life. Thinking that the labor might be sweetened by a taste of its economic rewards, the judge sold John some unfattened stock at a reduced price. John seems to have taken full advantage of the opportunity. When Friedgen visited the farm in August 1865, he reported to the CAS office: “John has grown up to be a fine young man respected by everyone. Has $200 in cash a horse and 7 acres of land.”9
In the end, however, the profit motive turned out not to be enough to bind the boy to farm life. As soon as Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox in April 1865, John began to look for ways to get out into the wider world. One day, on a visit into town, he saw a group of men and women waiting in line to enroll in a teacher training program. He joined them and a short while afterward was appointed master of the Mud Creek Public School in Sharpesville, Indiana, nine miles from Tipton.
During his two years at the school the community suffered a cholera epidemic that infected the entire farm family with whom John was boarding and killed two of them. For an extended period he was the only healthy person in the household and had to nurse the family in addition to carrying on with his duties as schoolmaster.
In a final attempt to persuade John to stay with him, Judge Green made him a proposition: “By continued application,” he said during one of John’s visits, “you can become a lawyer in my office, or you can take full charge of the farm. I will pay taxes, make the improvements and give you half of what the farm produces.”10 For an era in which the common understanding was that a foster child was infinitely beholden to the family who had taken him in, this was an extraordinarily generous offer. But teaching had only made John more adverse to resuming the life of a farmer, even if he might also practice law. His rejection of the offer brought a look of disappointment into the judge’s face that pierced John to the heart. “I was so overcome with emotion,” he wrote, “that when I went out on the road I fairly fell on my face and rolled in the dust with agony of tears. I felt that I had lost my best friend in making my decision.”11 Although John had certainly not lost Judge Green’s friendship, his decision would make it increasingly difficult for him to visit Tipton over the remaining years of his foster father’s life.
Not only had John Brady been placed with what Brace might have thought of as the ideal family, but he himself seems to have been Brace’s ideal orphan train rider. At Randall’s Island he had listened carefully to visiting missionaries—many of them graduates of the Yale Divinity School and/or Union Theological Seminary—and he seems to have taken them as role models. At Tipton he had similar feelings regarding his Sunday school teacher, about whom he says in his autobiography: “There was a graciousness in his face and manner which won me at once.”12 (Although Brady had been born into a Catholic family, once he came to live with the Greens he attended a Presbyterian church and a Methodist Sunday school and, like most Catholic orphan train riders, seems never to have given a second thought to the religion of his parents.) But it was not until he had gone to Mud Creek that Brady decided to become a minister himself—a decision he made, once again, while under the influence of a clergyman: the Reverend Isaac Montfort. In the fall of 1867, aided by a $100 scholarship that Montfort had obtained for him from the Presbyterian Board of Education, Brady attended the Waveland Collegiate Institute, a preparatory school dedicated to “the intellectual and religious training of pious youth for the gospel ministry.”13 After three years at Waveland, Brady moved on to Brace’s own alma mater, the Yale Divinity School.
Brady’s journey to New Haven, in the fall of 1870, brought him east for the first time since he had left on his orphan train. Although he made no attempt during an extended stopover in New York City to discover whether his father was still alive, he did visit the offices of the Children’s Aid Society and spent some time with John Macy. One result of this visit was that the CAS provided him with money to help defray the cost of his education—although he still had to work to meet expenses: as a janitor during the
school year and at a Pennsylvania sawmill during the summer. In October 1871, at Brace’s request, Brady wrote a letter telling his life’s story and including the pronouncement, “I shall ever acknowledge with gratitude that the Children’s Aid Society has been the instrument of my elevation. To be taken from the gutters of New York City and placed in a college is almost a miracle.” He signed the letter with the name he had taken shortly after moving to Tipton, “John Green Brady.”14
While this letter had been requested and written for use in CAS publicity (it appeared in both the society’s 1872 annual report and The Dangerous Classes), the whole future course of Brady’s life attests to its sincerity. After graduating from Yale in 1874, Brady, like Brace, moved to New York to study at Union Theological Seminary. During his three years at Union, Brady worked in city missions and frequently gave inspirational talks to the residents of the Newsboys’ Lodging House. And on graduation he decided that he too would devote his life to doing for poor city children what had been done for him.
Orphan Trains Page 24
