Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  Initially, prospective parents came forward voluntarily. Some were New Yorkers who could not bear children of their own. Others had lost a child to illness. Soon, out-of-towners began to look to the New York philanthropies as a source of adoptive children as well, both for family and charitable reasons. The House of Industry newsletter noted in 1857 that an Indiana merchant planning a business trip to New York “looks round among his customers to see who ‘wants’ to do good by taking a homeless boy or girl.” Some were grateful for any new addition to their family. A man in Wisconsin, in contrast, wrote to Halliday that “we would like a little girl from three to five years old, good-looking, light complexion, no freckles, darkish red or brown hair, with dark blue eyes or black, high forehead, pleasant disposition, smart and active, and an American child.” Halliday, who at that point in the late 1850s ran his own orphanage uptown, did not have a match, but found one for his picky correspondent at the House of Industry.51

  Hoping to place more of their children in the West, the charities eventually transported children at their own expense. In November 1856, the House of Industry and the Children’s Aid Society sent an Iowa minister westward with thirty children in search of homes.52 The mission also organized its own western journeys for children needing adoption, placing Rev. W. C. Van Meter in charge. On days when Van Meter headed west, large crowds gathered outside the mission to see the children off. A former newsboy who accompanied Van Meter to Iowa on one of these journeys wrote that at each railroad station, the children would sing a song for those gathered to meet the train. At each stop, one or two of the children would be adopted, and Van Meter would continue westward until all his wards had been taken. The sense of rejection felt by the last children to remain in each of Van Meter’s groups must have been excruciating. Hundreds of neighborhood youngsters were transported to new homes outside New York as a result of the charities’ adoption efforts.53

  Some of the orphans were brought to the charities by neighbors. Just after the Civil War, neighbors alerted mission workers to the case of three little girls, none older than ten, found in their “deep cellar on Baxter Street. The mother lay dead on the floor.” The woman had remained there since her death a day earlier because her children had not known what to do. Their father had passed away a few years earlier. The mission paid for the mother’s burial and found the children adoptive homes. Others asked to be adopted. An older sister brought nine-year-old Elizabeth Cline to the mission for adoption in November 1856. Their mother had died in 1849 and their father in 1853. Around the same time, Mary Ann Barr rang the mission’s doorbell. The Cow Bay resident, about twelve years old, had never known her mother and had not seen her father in two years. The mission sent her to a family in Burlington County, New Jersey.54

  Yet the majority of children put up for adoption by the Five Points charities were not actual orphans; at least 60 percent put up by the mission had living parents. Anecdotal evidence from the Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry suggests that most of the children it sent to adoptive homes also had at least one living parent.55 A variety of circumstances prompted parents to give their children up for adoption. Alcohol abuse frequently played a role. One mother reeking of liquor brought her four-year-old daughter Mary Anne to the House of Industry, telling the workers there that she could barely support herself, much less a child. The mission in 1856 recorded the case of “Mary Hare—aged 9 years . . . brought to us by a drunken mother, and given up to the mission.” They had apparently been living in a brothel (the mission’s secretary called it “a bad-house”) for more than a year. The mother claimed, however, that she went out begging rather than prostitute herself. “She declares she is undefiled, though she has passed through the mire.” The mission sent Mary to live with a newspaper editor in upstate New York.56

  The most famous adoption case from the two Five Points institutions also involved alcoholic parents. In 1853, the Tribune published a story by Solon Robinson entitled “‘Wild Maggie,’ of the Five Points.” Pease had apparently bestowed this nickname on a disheveled little girl named Margaret Reagan who lived in a basement on Centre Street near Anthony. Maggie came to Pease’s attention because of the way she relentlessly taunted and berated him. In a typical tirade, Maggie called Pease an “old Protestant thief. . . . I heard Father Phelan tell what you want to do with the poor folks at the Points; you want to turn them out of house and home, . . . and make them all go to hear you preach your lies.” After many attempts to lure Maggie into the House of Industry, Pease finally succeeded by offering to let her lay out the sewing work for the women he trained, a task she agreed to undertake only if he left the door open so he could not steal her and send her to “the Island.” She asked for more tasks of this sort and the apparently neglected girl soon began living at the House of Industry. At Pease’s urging, she convinced her parents to attend the organization’s temperance meetings. Despite their promise to reform, Pease convinced Maggie’s parents to allow her to remain at the House of Industry. They eventually consented to her adoption by a farming family living near Katonah in Westchester County. Her story touched New Yorkers deeply.57

  The vast majority of non-orphans given up for adoption had lived not with alcoholics but with widowed mothers who simply could not earn enough to support their children. Elizabeth Welland, for example, had managed to sustain herself and her son Henry through needlework for four years after her husband, a painter, died of “painter’s colic.” But after a six-week hospital stay prevented her from working, she became destitute and gave Henry to the mission. Twenty-three-year-old Irish immigrant Mary Harrison became a widow just a month after the birth of her first child. Quickly “finding all means of support exhausted,” she asked the mission to locate an adoptive family for her infant.58

  Some gave their children up to the mission soon after settling in New York because they found that earning a living there was much more difficult than they had expected. The widowed mother of twelve-year-old Hugh Reilly turned her son over to the mission just eight weeks after they arrived in America because she found that she could not support them both. A woman from Albany likewise moved to New York after both her husband and brother died because she thought she could earn more money downstate. Finding that seamstresses earned less than she had imagined, she brought her son James to the mission.59

  Catharine Donahue managed to find a new spouse after her first husband died, but he “treated her so ill that she was obliged to leave him.” With no means available to support herself, she gave her eight- and five-year-old daughters to the mission for adoption. These women did not part with their children until absolutely forced to do so. The House of Industry newspaper described the case of one woman who, made a virtual widow by her husband’s ten-year sentence to the penitentiary at Sing Sing, surrendered her baby for adoption rather than “see it starve to death before my face.” When the widowed mother of ten-year-old George Leon left her son at the mission for adoption, “he did not wish to stay and his mother had to slip away slyly from him; he cried for an hour afterwards and had to be held and compelled to stay until his fretting was over.”60

  Most adoptees were given up voluntarily by desperate parents. But when charity workers found children’s treatment or living conditions abhorrent, they sometimes took the youngsters forcibly. Pease usually tried to cajole these parents into parting with their offspring by describing the fresh air and material comforts their children would have in new homes. In one such case, Pease went to a tenement to determine why three sisters had stopped attending his day school. He discovered that their widowed mother had sent them out begging. The minister convinced the mother to let her two eldest daughters, Eliza and Maggie, live at the House of Industry, but she would not part with little Jane. “We felt that we could not give her up to a life of beggary and shame,” reported a House of Industry publication; so when a man came to the House of Industry a few weeks later looking to adopt a girl Jane’s age, Pease returned to see her. He found Jane eager to
go, and because her mother that day was in the “state of inebriation characterized by good nature,” she granted her permission, swayed in part because the adopting father gave her “a bonus” which “kept her in good humor.” Pease saw no harm in brokering such deals if they removed youngsters from such miserable circumstances.61

  On other occasions, Pease withheld assistance from desperate women and their children to force reluctant mothers to part with their offspring. His newsletter described one such mother whose husband had abandoned her “for the companions of the grog-shop.” After selling all her possessions to sustain herself and three children, she was evicted from her apartment, at which point she appeared at the House of Industry seeking shelter. She was told she could stay only if she would allow Pease to put her children up for adoption. At first she agreed, but as the day of their departure approached she changed her mind and took them away, insisting “she would sooner beg, or even starve with them, than be parted from her innocent babes.” Pease had once taken in and trained such women. By 1857, however, he had apparently concluded that the prospects for unmarried women with young children were so dismal that adoption was the best solution for both generations.62

  In at least some instances, children initiated their own adoptions without the consent of their parents. The teenaged street peddler John Morrow took his repeatedly beaten half sister from his alcoholic stepmother and brought her to the mission for adoption. The woman went to court to try to have her daughter returned, but the justice ruled that her abuse of the child invalidated her claims. Van Meter sent her to adoptive parents in Illinois. Morrow’s full sister, tired of supporting her stepmother’s drinking habit, also put herself up for adoption at the mission.63

  Another case in which a child chose to leave living parents involved seven-year-old Elizabeth Laughlin. Elizabeth was the little girl who ran away to Pease because she feared her stepfather would beat her after she fell asleep and failed to collect money from the prostitutes who used the rooms above his saloon. When Elizabeth’s father came for her the next day, Pease refused to release her. Laughlin returned with a note from the district’s police justice demanding that Pease hand her over, but he again demurred. The judge then summoned Pease to his courtroom, where the pastor once more insisted that he would not return Elizabeth to such a father. The infuriated police justice (possibly Matthew Brennan) called Pease’s conduct “one of the most high-handed, barefaced outrages I ever met with! I command you to deliver up the body of that child to her friends.” Pease asserted that only a higher court and a writ of habeas corpus could compel him to do so. The irate judge ordered his clerk to detain Pease and take a complaint against him from Laughlin, but the clerk said he had no right to do so, and Pease left.

  The minister then consulted with District Attorney A. Oakey Hall, who advised Pease to take Elizabeth out of the city in case Laughlin bribed a judge to issue a summary ruling. The next day, a court officer served Pease with a writ of habeas corpus, claiming that he had seized Elizabeth from the street “for the purpose of proselytism, she being a Catholic.” In response, Pease provided evidence indicating that Laughlin had previously struck Elizabeth in the head with a bottle and that he regularly forced her to stay awake far into the night collecting fees from prostitutes. When the judge asked Elizabeth whether she would rather live with Pease or return to Laughlin, she chose Pease, and the judge consented. Pease eventually found her a permanent home in upstate New York.64

  The handful of other cases in which Pease refused to return children to living parents who opposed their being adopted are more difficult to justify by modern standards. In one, he temporarily sheltered a twelve-year-old girl named Katy while her mother spent a night in jail for throwing bricks through the windows of the house inhabited by Katy’s father, who had abandoned Katy, her sister, and her mother, and moved in with another woman. When the father and his mistress left for California, Katy’s mother had trouble feeding her children and from time to time boarded Katy and her sister at the House of Industry. When Katy’s father returned from the West and reconciled with his wife, he demanded her back, but Katy (according to Pease) refused to go. Although the family hired a lawyer and sued for Katy’s return, Pease cited the husband’s behavior as evidence of the parents’ lack of morals. The judge ruled in Pease’s favor, and the minister eventually sent Katy to live with adoptive parents.65

  An even more shocking case was that of “Lizzie D.” In 1854, Pease had found Lizzie’s widowed mother one of the most-coveted live-in domestic service positions—one in which the employer allowed the servant to keep her children with her. Despite her apparent good fortune, Lizzie’s mother appeared on Pease’s doorstep three years later, clearly having been unemployed for some time. She asked Pease to let Lizzie stay at the House of Industry and promised to return for her and pay her board once she found new employment. “The dirty and degraded appearance of the woman,” wrote Pease, “made me mentally resolve that she should never again have possession of the child, to which, as I suspected, and afterwards learned, she had forfeited all moral right.” Saying she had found a job, Lizzie’s mother came back for her a few days later, but Pease said he would not give Lizzie to her until she had been employed steadily for a month. Pease then sent an investigator to the mother’s Cow Bay home. He found that the apartment “had but two occupants, a [male] negro and Mrs. D.” This was all the proof Pease needed of her lack of fitness as a mother, and he immediately put Lizzie up for adoption. On the day set for her departure to Illinois, Lizzie cried that she did not want to go, but Pease sent her to the West anyway. The minister reported that “Mrs. D. made a great show of sorrow for the loss of her child, and sent a lawyer to threaten legal measures if she was not restored. We told him of the scene in Cow Bay, and he quietly took his departure.” Although interracial liaisons—especially between Irish-American women and African-American men—were not unusual in Five Points, most whites considered them so repugnant that even Mrs. D.’s own attorney concluded that such a relationship would make it impossible for Mrs. D. to win the return of her daughter.66

  Not surprisingly, New York’s Irish Catholic community condemned the entire adoption system. The Irish-American insisted in 1859 that these “nominally religious and charitable” organizations were “really proselytising ‘societies’ . . . sinks of infamy, filth and corruption.” Noting that their adoption activities had become “more extended, more energetic and more successful,” the paper estimated that “at least five hundred children, the offspring of Irish Catholic parents, are proselytised, corrupted, and morally speaking, debauched, yearly, in New York, through their instrumentality.” The editors denounced all the Protestant agencies that engaged in adoptions for the purpose of proselytizing, but complained especially about “a fellow named Halliday at the head of the gang.” Considering himself a “special patrolman,” Halliday “prowled, like a reformation fox to kidnap children.” To prove its charges, the Irish-American described the case of a Fourth Ward woman named McInerny who was “not very careful or particular.” Halliday, “hearing that she was in the Tombs, strayed down to Cherry street . . . where he found one of [her] children on the stoop and gave him a penny, whereupon, having thus acquired a property in him, he took him all the way up to Judge Kelly, and there satisfied the judge by competent testimony, that the child ‘begged,’ whereupon Kelly . . . consigns the child to the affectionate care of ‘Patrolman’ Halliday.” The Irish-American claimed that the judge granted custody of the child to Halliday without the legally required advance notice, and that when the father attempted to win the child’s return, various magistrates used flimsy excuses to uphold the illegal proceedings. At each of these hearings, the newspaper noted ruefully, the “smirking” Halliday “appeared with two [photographic] portraits of the boy, one taken when in rags, and the other when clothed by the hand of charity,” which helped sway the judge to grant him custody. Most Catholic Five Pointers viewed the adoption programs with similar contempt.67

 
; By the mid-1860s, Irish Catholics came to believe that the Five Points Mission and House of Industry sold orphaned children into virtual slavery. In November 1863, the Irish-American reported that Father Edward O’Flaherty, while visiting the Indiana State Fair several years earlier,

  was horrified by the spectacle of thirty or forty children, boys and girls, all evidently of Celtic origin, penned up like so many cattle, for sale. Yes, the term is only too weak to express the reality of this outrage on humanity.... They were “children of the poor,” picked up in the lanes and streets of New York, congregated in a “Mission,” petted and supported by the canting admirers of African ebony, and finally, with altered names, and every clue by which their identity might be traced carefully destroyed, deported to the West, and, for sums varying from ten dollars to thirty-five, disposed of to non-Catholic buyers until . . . by reaching their maturity, they should become free from the bondage into which they had been sold. The same system is still at work.

  Six months before the Irish-American leveled its charges, the Freeman’s Journal had announced that Catholics had retained attorney James M. Sheehan “to abolish the kidnapping and enslaving” of Irish children. Van Meter “has been bound over to answer, and is sure to be indicted, on the charge of kidnapping children for the purpose of reducing them to slavery. Mr. Sheehan is also putting a Mr. Barlow, of the Five Points House of Industry, into water of a most uncomfortably high degree of temperature” (Benjamin R. Barlow served as superintendent of the House of Industry from 1857 to 1864). Sheehan’s advocacy of Catholic children’s rights, the Freeman’s Journal bragged, would force such ministers to limit their mischief to “setting the negroes loose to become vagabonds.” The remarks in both journals tying the supposed enslavement of Irish Catholic orphans to the wartime emancipation of southern bondsmen suggest that rumors of children’s enslavement sprang largely from Irish Americans’ resentment of Republican efforts on behalf of African Americans. Yet stories of Irish slavery in rural America persisted into the 1870s.68