Orphan Trains

by Stephen O'Connor

  John and Lucy Brace raised their children in a manner that combined equal parts of the Romantic veneration of childhood and nature with the old-fashioned Calvinist insistence on duty, diligence, and self-sacrifice. In part because Lucy was occupied in caring for the two youngest Brace children, Emma and the baby James, who was sickly, Charles was educated, in accordance with Puritan tradition, by his father. In the early years that education, apart from basic instruction in reading and writing, seems to have been largely informal. Charles would sometimes sit in on his father’s classes or tag along when John took Litchfield girls on woodland “tramps,” during which all members of the party would eagerly gather samples for their herbariums and mineralogical cabinets. But most of Charles’s education came in the form of his father’s extemporaneous lectures and inquisitions in the midst of daily routines. One of Charles’s favorite activities as a child was to go on solitary expeditions with his father to mountain streams, where, sitting on a broad rock or grassy bank, under the shifting shade of beeches, oaks, and larches, they would bait hooks, watch the glint of sunlight on the rushing water, and wait until they saw the line go stiff and felt the tug of a silvery life’s determination to endure.

  Although Charles was to spend most of his life working in cities, the deep pleasure in nature that was first nourished in Litchfield was to stay with him until the day he died. All of his writings, but especially his letters, are filled with evocations of natural beauty, even when that beauty is only a certain quality of sunlight on a brick wall. In his early twenties he would frequently speak of nature as an “expression of God to us,” or as containing some of “God’s qualities,” but these were only the rationalizations of a divinity student who felt the need to justify his every pleasure and interest by seeing it as some kind of communication with God.22 Brace’s love of nature was so much more basic, so much more a matter of simple sensuality and of the body’s joy at its own workings. He never felt so alive as when he was at what he once described as “my trouting, my ramblings over mountains and by willow-fringed brooks, all my ecstasies over the fresh green meadows and waving woods and bright flowers and trout streams.”23

  In 1833, when Charles was seven, his family moved to Hartford so that John could become the principal of Catharine Beecher’s Hartford Female Seminary. It was during this period—according to Charles’s biographer, his daughter Emma—that his education began in earnest.

  John Brace could hardly have been a more devoted teacher. For two hours every day, until Charles was fourteen, John read to him from the classic works of Greek, Roman, European, and American history, interspersing them with selections from Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott. By the time Charles attended Yale at sixteen, he could speak at least some French, German, Spanish, and Latin, and he also had received instruction in mathematics, biology, botany, entomology, and geology, but not much in chemistry or physics.

  John Brace was so devoted to his son that he would often neglect his seminary students. Emma Brace told a favorite family story about her father:

  His curiosity on subjects of history was insatiable, until his questions and his father’s elaborate replies became a torment to the young ladies of the school. When, finally, the child selected the dinner hour to propound his queries, and their teacher laid down his carving knife and fork, and the roast grew cold, the pupils, after suffering thus, silent and hungry on several occasions, rebelled. Charles was threatened. If he did not stay away with his questions, he should be kissed. Dreading this terror, after the manner of small boys, he desisted.24

  With all of his indulgence of Charles’s intellectual curiosity, John Brace was very capable of being hard on his son, even cruel, in the interest of developing fortitude and self-control. In a letter John wrote shortly after Charles moved to New York, he explained:

  Very early I exposed you to danger, urged you to climb, to swim, to do many things that many parents thought wrong and dangerous, for the very purpose of so familiarizing you to danger that you should be superior to fear. Do you remember in Litchfield my keeping you near the cannon when firing on review day, until you nearly fainted, and I had to take you into Mr. Deming’s house?25

  This was the side of John Brace’s character that caused even adoring students like Harriet Beecher Stowe to be afraid of him. He was a charming man, a published (though decidedly minor) novelist, and an author of humorous poetry who had little difficulty setting “the table in a roar” with his jokes and was, to his own mind, excessively fond of “female society.”26 But he was nevertheless driven and deeply serious—very much in the tradition of his Puritan ancestors.

  The fact that John Brace chose to introduce his Litchfield Female Academy girls to moral philosophy well ahead of their counterparts at the boys’ academies is an indication of just how important he believed the subject to be. Moral philosophy was never a mere exercise in mental agility for him, but simply the most basic and definitively human of all activities. Nothing mattered more to the elder Brace, or to his son, than the attempt to determine the nature of one’s obligation to one’s fellow man—and to God—and the attempt to discipline one’s character so as to fulfill that obligation to perfection. For the Braces, as indeed for most thinking people of their era, it was impossible to separate moral philosophy from theology. Although investigation of the good surely occupied a portion of every one of their weekdays, it always came into a particularly sharp focus on Sundays when they attended church.

  Apart from his father, the single most important figure in Charles Loring Brace’s early education was Horace Bushnell, minister of the North Congregational Church, which the Brace family attended during their Hartford years.

  Bushnell is regarded by many as the most important American religious thinker of the nineteenth century. He devoted his life to mediating between the vengeful God of the Puritan founders of his church and the Unitarian God of love who seemed to better express the spirit of his prosperous and increasingly easy era. More than any single theologian, Bushnell helped diminish American Calvinism’s emphasis on infant damnation and depravity, largely by showing how one’s religious identity—including one’s readiness for salvation—could be shaped during the earliest years of life. In this regard he was not only reflecting some of the child-rearing notions promulgated by his Hartford neighbors Lydia Sigourney and Catharine Beecher but also incorporating the Unitarian emphasis on lifelong religious development. His most influential work on this topic, and one that nearly earned him official condemnation for heresy, was Christian Nurture, which was published in 1847. Some of the core ideas for this book were first presented in a sermon entitled “Unconscious Influence,” which he delivered at the North Congregational Church on February 20,1842, to an audience that included the young Charles Loring Brace.

  Brace was fifteen years old at the time, about six months away from beginning his studies at Yale College. He was gaunt and broad-shouldered, with a jutting forehead, deep-set, pale eyes, and a long, heavy-nostriled nose—all features that were held during the nineteenth century to betoken strong character but whose effect was diminished in Brace by an exceedingly long and narrow jaw. In one photograph from around this time he seems to lurch toward the camera, his eyes weighty and his broad mouth dangling open, as if he were drunk. But in other photographs his gaze is tranquil, intelligent, searching, and just slightly impatient—the gaze of a young man who expects a tremendous amount both of himself and of everyone with whom he comes into contact.

  The account of Bushnell’s sermon that Brace inscribed into his diary that afternoon was brief, punctuated by self-consciously smart remarks, and consisted primarily of a recapitulation of Bushnell’s grandiose presentation of “unconscious influence” as something akin to a force of nature, on the order of earthquakes and the rising of the sun. But many years later Brace would write to a young friend that that morning’s sermon had “affected my whole life.”27

  Hear how [an earthquake] comes thundering through the solid foundation of nature. It ro
cks a whole continent. The noblest works of man, cities, monuments, and temples, are in a moment leveled to the ground, or swallowed down the opening gulfs of fire. Little do [people] think that the light of every morning, the soft, and genial, and silent light, is an agent many times more powerful. But let the light of the morning cease and return no more, let the hour of the morning come, and bring with it no dawn: the out-cries of a horror-stricken world fill the air, and make, as it were, the darkness audible. The beasts go wild and frantic at the loss of the sun. The vegetable growths turn pale and die. A chill creeps on, and frosty winds begin to howl across the freezing earth. Colder, and yet colder, is the night. The vital blood, at length, of all creatures, stops congealed. Down goes the frost towards the earth’s centre. The heart of the sea is frozen, nay the earthquakes are themselves frozen in, under their fiery caverns. The very globe itself too, and all the fellow planets that have lost their sun, are become balls of ice, swinging silent in the darkness. Such is the light which revisits us in the silence of the morning.28

  —Horace Bushnell

  All of his life Charles Loring Brace was attracted to grand hypotheses that aspired to be as comprehensive as God’s own thoughts. Preeminent among these was Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which was to have a profound effect on Brace’s understanding of his work among the urban poor. Brace himself would write two massive tomes that each strove to take as comprehensive a view of existence as Darwin’s. One purported to show how God used all the oldest religions of the world to prepare humanity for the revelation of the “highest truth,” Christianity; the other was a proto-anthropological attempt at a definitive survey of the “races” of the “old world.” Bushnell was Brace’s kind of thinker—never one to shy away from the cosmic implications of his ideas. And this, perhaps, is why it was Bushnell’s theological expression of ideas prefigured by Sigourney, Beecher, and Child—and to some extent already truisms among Hartford’s elite—that was to have the most powerful effect on fifteen-year-old Charles.

  Bushnell began his sermon with a quotation so brief most of his audience probably missed it: “There went in also that other disciple.” The line comes from the twentieth chapter of the Gospel of John, in which the apostle, who always referred to himself as “that other disciple,” said that when he and Peter heard from Mary Magdalene that Jesus had risen, they hurried together to see the evidence of this miracle with their own eyes. John arrived first at the cave where Jesus had been entombed, but stopped and—out of confusion, doubt, fear? (the motive is not named)—did not go in. Only after Peter arrived and entered the cave without hesitation did John follow him and both “see and believe.”

  Bushnell reminded his audience of this story and went on to introduce his main point:

  And just so, unawares to himself, is every man the whole race through, laying hold of his fellow-man, to lead him where otherwise he would not go. We overrun the boundaries of our personality—we flow together. A Peter leads a John, a John goes after a Peter, both of them unconscious of any influence exerted or received. And thus our life and conduct are ever propagating themselves, by a law of social contagion, throughout the circles and times in which we live.29

  Bushnell held that “unconscious influences,” such as lured John to follow Peter, are so powerful because, unaware of them as we are, they often feel like our own, natural impulses and so we put up no resistance to them. They are also powerful because, far more than our conscious attempts to influence others, they flow out of our true natures. Even just acts or statements (or laws, or institutions) can have a profoundly negative effect if we perceive that they are hypocritical, just as false or inadequate acts or statements can have positive effects if we see that they are well intentioned. And finally, unconscious influences are so powerful because they affect us in earliest infancy—even before we can speak or understand the way people represent their actions to us:

  The child looks and listens, and whatsoever tone of feeling or manner of conduct is displayed around him, sinks into his plastic, passive soul, and becomes a mould of his being ever after. . . . [Children] watch us every moment, in the family, before the hearth, and at the table; and when we are meaning them no good or evil, when we are conscious of exerting no influence over them, they are drawing from us impressions and moulds of habit, which, if wrong, no patience or discipline can wholly remove; or if right, no future exposure utterly dissipate.30

  It is with this point that Bushnell made his clearest break from the Puritan doctrine that God’s grace works almost exclusively through adult “conversion” (being “born again”) and that he commenced the argument that would ultimately help inspire Charles Loring Brace to spend his life working with children and families. Bushnell’s belief that these early unconscious influences have a direct effect on the child’s preparation for salvation caused him to speak of the responsibilities of parents—and of all people—in dire terms:

  [F]irst make it sure that you are not every hour infusing moral death insensibly into your children, wives, husbands, friends, and acquaintances. By a mere look or glance, not unlikely, you are conveying the influence that shall turn the scale of someone’s immortality. Dismiss, therefore, the thought that you are living without responsibility; that is impossible. Better is it frankly to admit the truth; and if you will risk the influence of a character unsanctified by duty and religion, prepare to meet your reckoning manfully, and “receive the just recompense of reward.”31

  When Bushnell told his parishioners that they must be responsible for—and therefore attempt to control—even those influences they were not aware of having on others and did not intend to have, he was placing a tremendous burden on them. Almost any act or statement, including those his parishioners believed most virtuous, could infuse “moral death” into their children, family, and friends. What is striking is that, rather than acknowledging the onerousness of this burden, Bushnell seemed to grow excited by it. His recommendation for how one might “sanctify” one’s character in order to avoid destroying the characters of others was uninflected by the slightest recognition of its difficulty; indeed, it was decidedly celebratory: “It is, first of all and principally, to be good—to have a character, that will of itself communicate good. . . . In order to act with effect on others, [the Christian] must walk in the spirit, and thus become the image of goodness: he must be so akin to God, and so filled with his dispositions, that he shall seem to surround himself with a hallowed atmosphere.”32

  During the early nineteenth century, when, for better and for worse, one’s moral character occupied a place in the public imagination akin to “fitness” and “success” today, certain expansive natures like that of Bushnell—and of his young parishioner Charles Loring Brace—responded to moral challenges the way contemporary joggers respond to marathons, or venture capitalists to promising start-ups. They understood the risks of accepting those challenges. They also knew their own limitations. They may even have known that they were likely to fail. But they felt that submitting to the most demanding moral discipline was worthwhile in and of itself, not only because it might bring some good into the world, or win them praise, or afford them moments of self-satisfaction, but because it represented something essential about what it was to be a human being, and to be alive.

  Charles would have enrolled at Yale in 1840, when he was only fourteen, had his mother not become seriously ill. Never very healthy, she died after only a short period of illness, and Charles and his family were so distraught that he put off attending college for two years. Lucy Porter Brace is hardly referred to in the Brace family’s correspondence, and Charles seems almost never to have spoken about her to his friends or children. In Emma Brace’s biography of her father, she says only that Lucy was “a self-devoted, anxious mother with hardly strength enough for the many cares of her little home.”33 The explanation for her absence from family correspondence was simply that she and John were never apart long enough for either to write.

  Charles finally enter
ed Yale in the fall of 1842 and, despite his youth, seems to have had little academic difficulty. He did so well in fact that if he was not ranked at the top of his class, he was very close to it—a situation that soon inspired an odd anxiety in him.

  Enough orthodox Puritanism survived in the Brace household—or at least in the mind of young Charles—for him to believe that virtue must be entirely selfless. One could not be truly good if one performed even the most apparently moral acts for any reason other than to serve God or humanity. Charles’s anxiety at Yale (or at least the anxiety he publicly acknowledged) was not over how his grades compared to those of other scholars, but over the fact that he wanted so desperately to be at the top of his class. He wrote about this moral failing to his sister Emma, who, apart from his father, was his closest soulmate within the family. She responded: “I do not see why you cannot be ambitious and at the same time have this feeling in subservience to God’s will; why can you not perform your duties to God at the same time, and ask his blessing upon your efforts.” Despite her sympathy for her brother’s problem, Emma had no hesitation about being ambitious on his behalf: “Though you have noble antagonists, I should think you may attain, if not the first (which I hardly dare to hope), at least one of the first.”34