Orphan Trains

by Stephen O'Connor

  One Sunday near the end of October 1849, Brace was rowed by two convicts from the rocky shore of Manhattan across the churning East River to Blackwell’s Island. Most of the leaves were already off the trees, and the bare branches were the color of the walls of the enormous prison that dominated the island. The armed ferryman had checked Brace’s papers before departure to make sure that his passage had been approved by the Department of Charities and Corrections, and during the voyage the small ferry passed another boat in which two convicts rowed a gun-toting guard against the current to keep an eye out for escaping prisoners. Other guards with guns were mounted in turrets at the prison’s corners and atop its central building.

  Whatever Brace may have thought of the penitentiary or the almshouse, his purposes that day exactly corresponded with theirs. He had come to help the lost souls on the island earn God’s forgiveness through sincere repentance. He went first to the almshouse chapel, where he preached without notes to an assemblage of paupers about a God who loved them no matter what they had done. In the afternoon he had more informal talks with inmates of the madhouse and the penitentiary, but he was most affected, as he wrote to his father, by the patients in the charity hospital:

  I have never had my whole nature so stirred up within me, as at what met my eyes in those hospital wards. Standing in a long room, with beds on each side, and speaking to the poor creatures as they lay there. They are nearly all, you know, diseased prostitutes, brought there mostly to die. Though some do recover. If a man could ever speak of the realities he believed, or of the love of Jesus to the guilty, ’twould be there. Ghastly faces peering from bandages around you, and others all festering with disease, or worn and seamed with passion, and some where pure, kind expressions must have dwelt once. You felt that you were standing among the wrecks of the Soul; creatures cast out from everything but God’s mercy. Oh! ’twas the saddest most hopeless sight. Some were young and delicate looking, seduced and deserted. God help them! I had a long day’s work.28

  He described this same visit in a letter to Fred Kingsbury, dwelling on details that perhaps he felt he could not mention to his father:

  There was a beautiful face amongst them, voluptuous, but really with very fine expression. She had seen better days, I suspect, than most of them, and seemed to look on almost proudly as we spoke. But as we—no, I—alluded to old friends, and home and the love which they had once, and the kind hearts which had been around them in old days, and then told them in the simplest, most untechnical words I could use, of the Friendship they might have in Jesus, and His love to them, she could not refrain her tears, as I hardly could mine. Oh, what a gleam they gave for a moment on that life of pain and sin and remorse she had had! God help her! It’s as near hopeless as can be for the prostitute to reform.29

  After Brace began his Sunday visits to Blackwell’s Island, he all but ceased talking of a career in the pulpit. His letters were full of meditations on the “inefficiency of religion” and particularly on that “Calvin piety” that sees Christian duty as being fulfilled merely by regular attendance at church, revival meetings, and the like, rather than by following the example of Christ and sacrificing oneself to help others. Brace was determined to “serve God by suffering,” but he was not sure exactly what he should do. For a while he continued to assert in his letters that he should help others by applying the craft that he had just spent two years acquiring—that is, by preaching—but his enthusiasm for this goal seemed to steadily diminish.

  During the bleak fall and winter of 1849 and 1850 Brace was in the midst of the most severe challenge to his faith of his entire life. He had flirted with atheism while in divinity school, but really only so that he could maintain afterward that his belief in God had remained unshaken by the most thorough and rational examination. The doubt he endured during Emma’s long, awful decline was of a wholly different order. Despite all of his assertions to the contrary, Brace was having grave difficulty believing in the kindness of the God who was killing his sister. In the letter to John Olmsted in which he confessed his doubts, he also said that, for the first time in his life, he wished for his own death, so that he might be “some place where these pains and heartaches would be all over forevermore.”30

  But for all his suffering and confusion, Brace remained true to his resolution that his sister’s death should have the best possible effect on him. It was during her last terrible months that he finally and irrevocably shifted his ambitions from the “theological” to the “practical.” And perhaps most significantly of all, it was in a letter to Emma, written on February 15,1850, just two days before she died, that he first mentioned the social problem that would occupy him for the rest of his life:

  My dear Emma: Isn’t this a wonderful winter? We have hardly had any here, it is so mild and clear. And then when it is cold you would hardly know it, the sun is so bright. I think, after all, there is a great deal of beauty in winter, especially when there’s snow over everything. The sky is uncommonly beautiful this season with us, and we have towards night a peculiar cold gray tint which I have not often seen described. Have you ever noticed the effect produced this season of the year by the afternoon sunlight tingeing a cloud of steam, the most delicate, fading away, not-to-be-looked-at purple color, you ever could see. Try it. New York is whirling on as usual. You can have no idea, Emma, what an immense vat of misery and crime and filth much of this great city is! I realize it more and more. Think of ten thousand children growing up almost sure to be prostitutes and rogues!31

  When Emma died, on a Sunday, Charles locked himself in his basement room for three days and three nights and emerged, by his own account, “not gloomy” but determined to be purified by his sorrow. Although the most important part of that purification was to come through work, Charles decided that it should begin with some play: a walking tour of England and Ireland in the company of the Olmsted brothers.

  Initially, only Charles and John were to make the tour—Charles, so that he might get over his grief, and John, only just engaged to Mary Perkins (the granddaughter of Fred’s Staten Island neighbor), to have a last adventure as a single man. John also hoped that the trip would improve his health. He had been sickly ever since contracting a lung ailment during his first year at Yale and had suffered a particularly severe bout of illness that winter—a bout made all the more frightening by what was happening to his childhood sweetheart. Fred had not been invited because the two friends had assumed that he would not be able to leave his farm during the peak growing season, and in any event, they knew he did not have the money. Fred, however, could not bear the idea of his brother and best friend going off on such an adventure without him. So he begged cash off his father and left South Side in the care of his Irish farmhands.

  Their ship sailed out of New York Harbor on May 2, after an aborted mutiny by its drunken crew, and arrived at Liverpool nearly a month later. Brace and the Olmsted brothers spent a few days exploring Liverpool before crossing the Mersey and, knapsacks over their shoulders, officially commencing their walking tour. Over a period of four weeks they meandered south through Gloucester and Salisbury to the Isle of Wight, and then headed north to London. Although they occasionally traveled by train, they spent most of their time on small country roads, stopping when the fancy took them to look in on farms, markets, and orchards and making more purposeful visits to well-known parks and gardens, and to jails, debtors’ prisons, and schools for the poor, as well as to more common tourist spots, such as Tintern Abbey and Stonehenge. Brace was particularly interested in visiting the “ragged schools,” which offered education to children whose poverty and tattered, stinking clothes made them unwelcome in standard schools.

  From London they traveled by sailing ship to Belfast, where they spent several days as the guests of Robert Neill, a passionate opponent of American slavery who had played host to many abolitionists on European speaking tours, including William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. The person who most interested Brace during the visit
, however, was Neill’s daughter, Letitia, who shared his interest in spirituai matters. The two of them would often take long walks about the city and its environs.

  In a letter to John Olmsted written in Germany several months later, Brace described his relationship with Letitia as a “delightful sisterly friendship.”32 In another letter, written to Letitia at about the same time, he seemed to be bidding her a final farewell: “[Y]ou, dear, trustful friend, how much I hope for a happy and useful future to you. Not, either, happy, but one which shall best fit you for the progress in the life beyond. God aid you, and may we both become more spiritual and nearer Him in our lives. You can have a noble future. It is to be seen whether you will.”33

  Despite the implications of this letter, Brace returned to Belfast at the end of his European tour—more than a year after his first visit. By the time he left to return to America, he and Letitia had begun to talk, at the very least, about the possibility of marrying.

  In early October 1850, Fred and John Olmsted set sail on the City of Glasgow, returning to farm and fiancé, respectively, and Brace went on to Hamburg to study politics and theology. His original plan was to return to the United States just before Christmas, but much to the consternation of his family, who worried that a prolonged stay in Europe would unsuit him for the “practical” life of his native country, Brace decided to remain in Germany until spring, and then move on to tour Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, and Italy.

  Brace had a wonderful time in Germany. His studies were stimulating, he made very good friends, drank gallons of potent German coffee, and was a popular guest at dinner parties. He loved the spirited, affectionate, and straightforward—if occasionally risqué—social interaction of the Germans, whose gatherings made American parties, especially in New England, seem so dreary, stiff, and superficial by comparison. But it was the life of the ordinary German family that he most admired and envied: “There are not in all my memories,” he wrote,

  pictures so warm and glowing, as of some of these families in North Germany; families where the look and language of Affection were not blurred by that everlasting formalism and coldness and selfishness which hangs over our households; where love was without dissimulation, neither worn for duty, nor worn for effect; where mutual kindness and self-sacrifice and affection had so long been, that the very air and aspect seemed to welcome and sun the stranger.34

  Brace believed that the simple and honest affection of the Germans “manifested the great principle of Christ’s self-sacrificing love” far more authentically than the superficial “formalism” of the United States, where one’s virtue—or Christianity—was thought to be determined by how rigidly one conformed to certain prescribed behaviors, like going to church and saying grace. Brace earned vilification as an infidel and a drunk when, in an article he wrote from Germany for the Congregationalist weekly The Independent, he declared that America needed a “revival in home life” more than a “revival of religion.”

  But Brace did not think that excessive formality of religion and social manner were the only factors contributing to America’s anemic family life. Rather, the prime culprits he cited in his book Home-Life in Germany, published after his return to the United States, were a “universal greed for money, [the] clangor and whirl of American life, [and] the wasteful habits everywhere growing up.”35

  Brace had always been a critic of American materialism, especially that of New York City, which he called “the materialist place in our country.”36 In part, he objected to American commercial culture as a matter of moral principle: his highest virtue was self-sacrifice, and he saw materialism as consummately selfish. But during his year and a half in New York he had also become acutely aware of the more concrete consequences of commercialism: the impoverishment and abject misery of an unprecedentedly large segment of the population.

  One of the reasons Brace had found it difficult, in the wake of his sister’s illness, to figure out exactly how he might labor “for human happiness” was that in the United States there were really only two methods for dealing with the poor: preaching at them and incarcerating them. In Germany, however, he discovered a third alternative, one guided by Christian ideals but fundamentally practical in its execution.

  The German institution that most interested Brace was the Rauhe Haus (Rough House), a residential school for vagrant children outside of Hamburg. The Rauhe Haus had been founded by Johann Hinrich Wichern, the leader of the Inner Mission, a Christian socialist movement that had started in the 1830s but underwent a substantial rise in prominence in 1848—the year of the revolutions and the publication of The Communist Manifesto—as the middle classes grew increasingly anxious about the rage of the poor.

  In the United States, orphaned and vagrant children were confined to institutions founded on the superficial conformity to ritual and rules that Brace so objected to in American society generally. Orphanages and houses of refuge often vowed, in the words of a New York Orphan Asylum report, to treat the children in a “strictly parental” manner and to clothe “the Institution as far as possible with those hallowed associations which usually cluster about home.”37 In practice, however, the children got nothing like parental or homelike treatment. They were dressed in identical uniforms. They ate, slept, and marched in long anonymous rows. And they were subjected to strict, unvarying routines. As for religion, which the institutions ostensibly considered essential to the reform of vice-prone children, it could hardly have been more superficial. When, for example, Lydia Maria Child toured an orphan asylum in rural Queens, New York, her guide informed her with evident pride that it was “beautiful to see [the children] pray; for at the first tip of a whistle, they all dropped on their knees.”38

  In his book Home-Life in Germany, Brace amply illustrated his vision of the superiority of the Rauhe Haus to American institutional care for vagrant children:

  An omnibus ride of three miles carried me to its neighborhood, and after a walk through a pleasant wooded lane, I reached the place. The whole looked as little like the usual home for vagrants, as is possible. I saw no squads of boys walking demurely about, but looking as though the very devil was in them, if they could only let it out. There were no heavy-looking overseers, discoursing piously of the number whom Providence had committed to their charge—and thinking of their pockets. And there was not even the invariable home for forsaken children—the huge stone building, with one bare sunny court-yard. The idea seems to have been here, that those who have no home of their own, as much as possible should be given of the home which God has prepared for all.

  It was a large, open garden, full of trees and walks and flowers and beds for vegetables, while on each side stretched away green corn-fields. Among the trees there were some dozen plain, comfortable little wood houses, like old fashioned farm-houses, scattered about, and one quiet shaded chapel. The boys visible outside were busy cleaning the flower-beds, or working in the harvest field; some also, repairing fences and buildings.39

  These children were not merely doing busy work or practicing two or three isolated skills, such as cleaning lanterns or stitching on buttons, as they would have at an American institution. The residents of the Rauhe Haus participated in all the varied labors that ordinary farm children normally performed, and did so not as an exercise in discipline but for the benefit of the whole community—or so it seemed to Brace. In addition to working in the garden and on the surrounding farm, the children took turns in a variety of workshops for tailoring, joining, spinning, and baking and had several hours of school each day, as well as time off for play.

  As much as Brace appreciated the harmonious integration of the Rauhe Haus with its natural environment, it was the institution’s attempt to approximate natural home life that most impressed him. In each of the little wood houses a “family” of some twelve boys or girls lived with an adult theological student, who was assisted by a devout farmer or mechanic. The intimacy of this arrangement may not have reproduced the bonds of a loving family, but it certain
ly made it possible for supervisors and children to get to know and perhaps trust one another much more thoroughly than they would have under the standard American model.

  Most of the children stayed at the Rauhe Haus for five or six years and then, like their counterparts in the United States, were bound out to farmers, mechanics, or craftsmen. Some of them, however, did their apprenticeship at the Rauhe Haus printing press, which, to Brace’s amazement, managed to turn a profit and help support the institution.

  Brace completed Home-Life in Germany in March 1853, the very month when he and a group of concerned New York businessmen and Protestant clergy announced the foundation of the Children’s Aid Society, and one can detect in the conclusion of his almost rapturous account of the Rauhe Haus an idealized vision of what his own organization might accomplish:

  “A Home among the Flowers” [Brace’s preferred name for the Rauhe Haus], where the vagrant—the child nourished amid filth and squalor—in the dark cellars of a great city, should at length see something of God’s beautiful world; where among friends, in the midst of orchards and corn-fields, he could grow up, invigorated by healthful labor, to manhood—all this would seem alone more like the dream of a philanthropic French novelist, than the reality.40