Orphan Trains

by Stephen O'Connor

  Brace was himself a schoolteacher at that time. He taught Latin at the Rutgers Institute four and a half hours a day for six dollars a week—very good money he thought.14 He also wrote regular articles for several publications, including the New York Daily Times and the Independent—the Congregationalist newspaper associated with Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. In the evenings Brace went to clubs and hotels with other young writers and journalists and smoked cigars, drank ale, and engaged in rampant speculation in which, according to Fred Kingsbury, “nothing was regarded as settled, and if so regarded, there was all the more reason why it should be unsettled at once.”15

  With all of this activity on top of his regular studies, Brace had become thoroughly involved in the “rush and whirl” of Manhattan that had so impressed and slightly daunted him on his first arrival. As intoxicated as he was by his life as a New Yorker, it wearied him, and he worried, as he wrote to Fred Kingsbury, that it was numbing his moral sensibilities:

  [D]o you not feel afraid . . . of this crowding of life’s business, in wearing off some of our best human feelings too, as well as our love for God? Just look around and see how few men keep any of the warm or noble sentiments which they had once. I am inclined to think it is particularly so in this country. Perhaps money-making is more entirely absorbing. . . . I don’t believe we have any idea how long devotion to some inferior object or how the wear and rubbing of poverty may rub away the best and noblest impulses we have. Can a man be an earnest, enthusiastic worshiper of principle when he finds it doesn’t bring him in eighteen pence a day? Shall we love and clasp men to us when we don’t get five minutes out of the twenty-four to kiss our wives?16

  Frederick Law Olmsted’s Staten Island farm, “South Side”—paid for by a $12,000 loan from his father—encompassed 130 acres near Seguine Point, looking out over the Atlantic Ocean just south of the entrance to New York Harbor. The house was Dutch, with a broad wooden porch—or piazza—running around its seaward sides. Olmsted believed that farming was the healthiest, happiest, and most virtuous life a man could have, and he often declared that he loved no work so much as plowing. The fact that he was, at best, a middling agriculturalist who never managed to turn a profit at either of his two farms did nothing to diminish his appreciation for the calling.

  Every weekend that they could manage, especially during the summers, Charley and John would escape the heat and noise of Manhattan for the tranquillity of South Side, where they would take walks along the pebbly shore or through a thick wood of oak, maple, sweet gum, and sassafras and sit on the broad piazza eating peaches, writing letters, and watching ships pass by under tan sails or plumes of black smoke. Fred Olmsted, occupied with farmwork from dawn until six in the evening on Saturday, would return to launch into debates with Charley that, fueled by good food and wine, lasted until the early hours of the morning and then continued all day Sunday. Not infrequently, however, these passionate disputations were relieved by visits from young women—in particular from nineteen-year-old Mary Perkins, who was the granddaughter of one of Fred’s neighbors. She and John became engaged in February 1850 and were wed the following fall. After John’s death of consumption in 1857, Fred married his sister-in-law and adopted John’s son, who had been christened John Charles but was called Charles.

  As stimulating as Brace may have found the company at South Side, what he most loved about his visits to the farm was the opportunity to reimmerse himself in nature. Almost every one of the letters he wrote from the island contained an extended meditation on the landscape that surrounded him and on its relationship to the divine. In the early spring of 1849 he wrote to his sister, who was then living in Georgia:

  My dear Emma: Sunday again on the Island, about nine o’clock in the evening, and such a beautiful day! Since I have learned to look more on beauty as the expression of God to us, I have explained many of the peculiar feelings I have always had about it. That strange sadness—dreaminess—the pure effect it always had on me,—for I believe in the strongest sense of the Infinite, or of some of God’s qualities, in the lines and colors of nature. I took a long walk alone on the beach this afternoon,—the old golden light on everything, with the blue, dreamy highlands, and the gray sky in the east, against which everything stood out so beautifully, the sea sparkling and deep blue, with the same unceasing whisper on the beach—hush! hush! I did enjoy that walk. And could not help but think of Him who was over it all, and who looked through all upon me. You, too, came in, and my own foolish, imperfect life, and all I might be and the little I was.17

  The spring of 1849 was one of the most catastrophic in New York City’s history. On May 10, fans of the celebrated American actor Edwin Forrest gathered in front of the Italian Opera House on Astor Place to protest a performance by Forrest’s British rival, William Charles Macready. Police surrounded the crowd and, when the protesters refused to disperse, fired into it, killing thirty-one people and wounding forty-eight—and, not incidentally, setting off what is still the bloodiest civil disturbance ever to occur in New York apart from the draft riots of 1863. Over the next two days, in what became known as the Astor Place Riot, seventy police officers were wounded and at least three more people were killed. Most of the protesters in front of the opera house were Irish immigrants. Despite the aesthetic and nationalistic dispute that had ostensibly brought them there, the ensuing riot was widely interpreted as an expression of the class and ethnic antagonisms that had already spawned nine serious riots in New York City since the start of the century.18 The violence particularly disturbed many city residents because it followed so hard on the heels of the European revolutions of 1848, which were also fueled by ethnic and class antagonism. But the riot also came in the midst of New York’s most virulent cholera epidemic ever. By New Year’s Eve of 1849, 1 percent of the city’s population—or 5,071 people—would die of the disease, and many residents began to feel that the foundations of civilization were crumbling beneath their feet.19

  Brace was involved in both catastrophes. Although he apparently only witnessed the riot, he came close enough for his father to call him “foolhardy.” And he ministered to at least one dying cholera victim, an experience he described to his father as “the first of those poor efforts I should be glad to lay at the feet of Christ.”20

  The spring of 1849 did indeed mark the beginning of Brace’s career of social activism. But despite his long-term aspirations, the actual commencement of his career was a response less to the need of the community than to a calamity within his own family.

  As inspiring a teacher as John Brace may have been, he had never been able to earn enough money to raise his family above the lower edge of middle-class respectability—a fact that seems not to have diminished his children’s admiration for him in the least. When it came time to start earning a living, Charles and Emma both chose to follow in their father’s footsteps by becoming teachers, and they did so simultaneously, in the autumn of 1846. Charles had just finished his undergraduate studies at Yale and had taken a job at a Connecticut country academy in part so as to save up enough money to attend Yale’s Divinity School. Emma, however, never went to college. Her formal education ended when she graduated from the Hartford Female Seminary. Although she thought teaching a noble profession, and one that would inspire her to improve her own character (as she put it, the need of her students “to hear of God and his mercies” would provide her with strong “inducements to do good”21), the primary reason she took a job at a rural school in Garrettsburg, Kentucky, was that she wanted to relieve her father of the financial burden of supporting her.

  Emma stayed in Garrettsburg for two years. In the autumn of 1848 (around the time Charles moved to New York), she took a new job at a school in Georgia. Toward the end of her first term there John Brace decided to give up his own teaching career and to take a job as the editor of the Hartford Courant, a move that caused Charles perhaps his first major disappointment in his father. Writing in response to the news, Charles accu
sed John Brace of becoming a “mere party-instrument” and declared: “We had better, all of us, for our own self-respect and God’s respect, too, be digging potatoes for a living than hanging on the skirts of a party for an office.”22

  It is not clear why John Brace decided to give up the tranquil purity of the female seminary for the brutality and corruption of city politics, but it is at least sadly ironic that in the very season when he at last acquired the financial wherewithal to enable Emma to give up her job and return home she contracted tuberculosis.

  Her illness began with what appeared to be a severe cold in the spring of 1849. After a month or two of bed rest, during which Charles came to visit her, she was at last well enough to return north and recuperate in Litchfield, at the home of her aunts, Sarah and Mary Pierce. Charles was there to greet her on July 18 and wrote a letter to their father that first evening:

  Emma came today. She is much better than she was at the South. . . . I think this air will benefit her, and Aunt Mary’s kind care. If she will only be prudent, and I think she will. She is cheerful, yet looking at things as they are. We may have hope, and yet must be ready for the worst. Let us leave her in God’s hands. My heart is almost crushed sometimes as I think of her, and yet I see that God is never more truly kind than in such trials.

  Brace chose to find kindness in the illness that was destroying his beloved sister by seizing on it as the force that would motivate him, finally, to act on his beliefs. In this same letter, he told his father that he was able to bear his sister’s situation “cheerfully” only by concentrating on the labors he might perform “for human happiness, for God. My future as I draw it, has not for some time been one of happiness. I do intensely long to give every effort and thought to the good of men, to truth.”23 Again and again in the letters that he wrote over the next seven months he portrayed Emma’s illness as the “kindness” that would inspire him to labor for others—a labor that he habitually portrayed as self-sacrifice: “I believe I can serve God by suffering.”24

  In late October, as Emma’s condition grew steadily worse, he began to minister to the terminally ill young women at the New York Charity Hospital on Blackwell’s Island.

  For more than two centuries Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island) had been one of the more isolated and picturesque spots in the archipelago that made up greater New York City. Nearly two miles long, and lying in the East River between Manhattan and Queens, the island had been the refuge to which Captain John Manning fled in disgrace after losing New York to the Dutch in 1673. And for some five generations, starting in the early eighteenth century, it had been farmed by members of the Blackwell family, from whom the island derived its name. During the 1840s it was still possible to stroll through the island’s many arbors and past its willow-shaded wells, to look out across the roiling East River at the white houses scattered on the green hills of Manhattan, and feel that one was in the midst of a rustic paradise. That impression, however, would be sadly dissipated as soon as one turned one’s gaze to the island’s four major structures, each of which served as a receptacle for a different variety of New York City’s human refuse.

  The Department of Charities and Corrections had purchased the island from the Blackwells in 1828, primarily because the fierce tidal currents surrounding it would make it difficult for anyone confined there to escape. At the island’s extreme northern end was the city’s madhouse, a large building with an octagonal tower that, according to the day’s theories, would help orient the disoriented by harnessing the earth’s magnetic forces. For those poor souls whom magnetism failed to improve, however, a standard nineteenth-century fare of cold baths, shackles, and locked cells was also available.

  At the island’s southern end lay the Charity Hospital, where the city’s poor and destitute came to be treated for any number of ailments, primarily alcoholism and venereal disease. The largest portion of the patients were prostitutes suffering the final and most grotesque stages of syphilis. The hospital had separate sections for men and women as well as a children’s ward, which Lydia Maria Child, the abolitionist and mother’s guide author, visited in 1842: “This establishment,” she wrote of the children’s ward,

  though clean and well supplied with outward comforts, was the most painful sight I ever witnessed. About one hundred and fifty children were there, mostly orphans, inheriting every variety of disease from vicious and sickly parents. In beds all of a row, or rolling by dozens over clean matting on the floor, the poor, little, pale, shriveled, and blinded creatures were waiting for death to come and release them. Here the absence of a mother’s love was most agonizing; not even the patience and gentleness of a saint could supply its place; and saints are rarely hired by the public.25

  Near the center of the island was the city’s newest almshouse, an institution where those who had committed no other crime than being destitute were incarcerated. Almshouses had existed in the United States from the earliest colonial days. New York’s first was built by the Dutch in 1653. Although they were considered charitable institutions, they had been designed to grant their charity—chiefly shelter and food—in such a way that no one would think of accepting it except in the direst of circumstances. On Blackwell’s Island the men and women were housed in separate buildings, even if they were married, and their children were taken away from them and placed in nurseries on nearby Randall’s Island. Lest the “able-bodied”—men in particular, but also women—should be tempted to live off public expense rather than take whatever job (at whatever pay) they could find, all residents of the almshouse who were physically capable were required to work. The men broke stones in a quarry on the island, cared for the almshouse grounds, and worked in vegetable gardens. The women were set to sewing and knitting and housework, especially brushing mattresses and floors to keep down the population of vermin.

  The largest and oldest structure on the island was the New York Penitentiary, a massive edifice of hewn stone and rubble masonry that stood four stories high and was close to 500 feet across. The building housed both men and women, with the vast majority of the women being prostitutes. This institution was called a “penitentiary” rather than a “prison” because it was intended to redeem prisoners rather than merely punish them. As in the almshouse, and orphanages and houses of refuge, reform was to be accomplished through hard work, strict discipline, rigid schedules, and compulsory religion. Some penal institutions took additional steps to encourage penitence. At Sing Sing, for example, prisoners were not allowed to speak to one another so that they might better contemplate their sins and repent. At the Eastern Penitentiary outside of Philadelphia such contemplation and repentance were encouraged—at least ostensibly—by keeping prisoners in solitary confinement for the whole term of their incarceration. But neither of these moral reform techniques was practiced on Blackwell’s Island. Inmates there were allowed to talk freely, and although the penitentiary’s 756 stone cells had been designed for single occupancy, they often contained two and even three prisoners. For the most part, the men and women in the penitentiary did exactly the same work as those in the almshouse, with the difference that they wore black and buff striped woolen clothing, were kept in shackles, and were watched by armed guards.

  Lydia Maria Child also visited the prison on her tour, with a decidedly radical agenda that she took no pains to conceal from the people accompanying her. When one of these companions was prompted to ask, regarding the prisoners, “Would you have them prey on society?” she replied:

  I am troubled that society has preyed upon them. I will not enter into an argument about the right of society to punish these sinners; but I say she made them sinners. . . . The world would be in a happier condition if legislators spent half as much time and labour to prevent crime, as they do to punish it. The poor need houses of encouragement; and society gives them houses of correction. Benevolent institutions and reformatory societies perform but a limited and temporary use. They do not reach the ground-work of evil; and it is reproduced too
rapidly for them to keep even the surface healed. The natural, spontaneous influence of society should be such as to supply men with healthy motives and give full, free play to the affections, and the faculties. It is horrible to see our young men goaded on by the fierce speculating spirit of the age, from the contagion of which it is almost impossible to escape, and then see them tortured into madness, or driven to crime, by fluctuating changes of the money-market. The young soul is, as it were, entangled in the great merciless machine of a falsely-constructed society; the steam he had no hand in raising, whirls him hither and thither, and it is altogether a lottery-chance whether it crushes or propels him.26

  While Charles Loring Brace would never have condemned the “speculating spirit” of his age quite so ferociously, he would absolutely have concurred with Child’s basic premises—published when Brace was sixteen and still a devoted member of Horace Bushnell’s congregation—that society ought to prevent crime by giving men “healthy motives” and “full, free play to the affections, and the faculties.” In particular, he would agree with the opinions of the superintendent of the penitentiary, who—“unmasked,” as Child put it—told her

  that ten years’ experience had convinced him that the whole system tended to increase crime. He said of the lads who came there, a large proportion had already been in the house of refuge; and a large proportion of those who left, afterward went to Sing Sing. “It is as regular a succession as the classes in a college,” said he, “from the house of refuge to the penitentiary, and from the penitentiary to the State prison.”27