the question of justice to the weak, and of Human Brotherhood, have no connection whatever with the scientific problem of Origin. The strong are equally bound to be merciful to the weak: men are equally under obligations to follow the Law of Love, and Slavery is equally wicked and damnable, whether mankind have one parent or twenty parents. The moral Brotherhood of man does not depend on community of descent, but on a common nature, a similar destiny, and a like relation to their common Father—God.5
Even with this passage’s implicit legitimization of the possibility of racial superiority, there is no question of Brace’s sincere desire to discount it, nor of his fierce abolitionism. Thus, it is puzzling that the CAS did so little for African American children prior to the draft riots. Blacks made up 4 percent of New York’s population, and a considerably larger proportion of the poor, during the mid-nineteenth century but were scarcely mentioned in CAS office journals and annual reports. Partly this was because New York’s African community had many self-help and charitable organizations of its own. The nationally celebrated Colored Orphan Asylum, in particular, duplicated some of the services offered by the CAS, including the orphan trains. But nothing explains the scarcity of black children as thoroughly as simple racism, within and outside the CAS.
With the lynching of eleven blacks and the torching of African American homes and institutions (including the Colored Orphan Asylum), the draft riots were a horrific example of racist violence. But Brace makes only passing mention of race in the CAS 1864 annual report and says nothing about it at all in his special draft riots circular. Given his long history of using the specter of the “dangerous classes” to scare money out of the “fortunate classes,” portraying the riots as the first skirmish in a potential class war may have been irresistible to Brace. But he also understood, if only because of the reluctance of the American elite to back emancipation, that his charity would suffer financially if it became too closely identified with African Americans. Indeed, after the Second World War, as Protestant child welfare organizations, including the CAS, became the first to have a largely black client base, they saw a substantial decline in contributions as compared to their more ethnically homogeneous Catholic and Jewish counterparts.
Racism also frustrated the few attempts the CAS did make to give black children the same treatment as whites. The one black boy sent west during the society’s first year was promptly returned by his farmer employer as “unsuitable.”6 And in the fourth CAS annual report, an unsigned letter from a Michigan clergyman averred that the only child ever to return to New York from his state was a “colored boy” whom C. C. Tracy brought back in 1856.7 This claim was utterly untrue, and Brace knew it. One of his own letters, written in 1863, told of two sisters, seven and nine years old, who left their Michigan placement in 1854, after only two weeks, and made their way back to New York all by themselves.8 The fact that he allowed the “colored boy” to be labeled Michigan’s only failed placement at the very least says something about which population he thought it most permissible to fail.
This boy, however, was something of a darling at the CAS, and other passages about him illustrate the society’s “friendlier” strains of racism. He was the child whose question about a guardian angel statuette in the CAS office inspired William Colopy Desmond to write a poem as well meant and as sabotaged by its own rhetoric as Brace’s Races of the Old World:
There stood a white robed angel,
Within a fair recess,
With guardian hand extended,
Dear little ones to bless;
And near a boy was musing—
Of Afric’s hapless race—
His dark eyes on the statue,
And tears upon his face.
Oh! tell me, little brother,
So favored in your hue,
Have I a Guardian Angel
To watch o’er me like you?
When I would wander darkly
From God and truth astray,
Have I a Guardian Angel,
To turn me on his way?
The “little brother,” a “boy with golden hair” and “tears within his blue eyes / And on his cheeks so fair,” responds, in part:
We both have guardian angels,
For both to God are dear—
And brother while we love him,
Our angels will be near.
Those guardians hither led us,
And all this little band,
Where kindly friends protect us,
And take us by the hand.9
The black child is “hapless,” confused, a victim. The white child is “favored” and “fair,” wise beyond his years, compassionate and condescending. It does not take a great deal of imagination to see how such a vision of the races and their relations could sap the self-esteem of the very African American children whom Desmond, Brace, and the other CAS staff believed themselves to be helping.
But black children were also subject to much more direct racism within the CAS, including from other beneficiaries, as is illustrated by the following extract from the journal of the Newsboys’ Lodging House’s first year:
A little negro boy lately applied for lodging, but with no money. The question was, whether to trust him; after some delay, one of the large boys, Mick, spoke up, “I say, Mr. Tracy, there’s three cents to Jimmy’s lodging!” Mr. T. thanked him; and the evening passed quietly, but when the time for settling came, just before bed-hour, “Mick” repented, “Mr. Tracy! I ain’t agoin’ to pay that nigger’s lodgin’.”
“Very well,” said Mr. T., and then told him, of course, he could do as he chose with his money—but said he, “this little colored boy is a respectable, well-behaved boy, as much as you—and you have no right to speak about him in that way.” “I have taken you in, a good many of you, when you were much worse off than he—some of you were ragged and dirty and hungry—and you hadn’t anyone to care for you, and I was a father to you—and now you will talk in this way at the boy, because his skin is not so white as your’s.”
One tall boy, who had been once a regular loafing hard boy, was seen to wipe his eyes at this. Mick looked terribly ashamed. And, “Here’s a cent, Mr. Tracy, for Jimmy!” came from one of the boys, and “here’s another!” and “here’s another,” until the six cents were made out. “Ye’ll have bad luck!” said the boys, pointing at Mick, as they went in to bed. “Ye will, ‘cause you didn’t give nothin’ to Jimmy’s lodgin’.”10
Much as Brace downplayed race in his writing on the draft riots, they were the catalyst for a significant escalation in aid to black children. The change began even as the rioters were battling Union troops in the street. With the destruction of the Colored Orphan Asylum, hundreds of black children were left homeless, and Brace felt that the most pressing task was to help the asylum’s managers to find them shelter. One of the places he put the children up was at the Cottage Place Mission, which had been founded in 1859 by his second-in-command, John Macy, and Macy’s two sisters. According to Brace, when the mission’s school opened following the riots and word got around that there were now black students in attendance,
a deputation of hard-looking, heavy-drinking Irish women, the mothers of some twenty or thirty of the children, waited on [Miss Macy] to demand the exclusion of some colored children. In the most amiable and Quaker-like manner, but with the firmness of the old Puritan stock from which she sprung, she assured them that, if every other scholar left, so long as that school remained it should never be closed to any child on account of color. They withdrew their children, but soon after returned them.11
In the months following the riots the CAS opened a “colored school” on Spring Street, which, as Brace claimed in an annual report, had “a high reputation” and attracted students from “distant parts of the city,”12 and the Saint John’s Park School on Hudson Street, which served “utterly destitute” children of “various nationalities, Jew, Irish, German, Italian, and colored.”13 More black children also began to attend the CAS’s regu
lar industrial schools.
African American children never made up more than a smattering of orphan train riders, largely because the CAS did not have an extensive enough network of connections among black farmers and Brace felt that black children placed with white farmers were less likely to establish a family-like relationship and more likely to be used as slave labor. On the whole, he considered their placement better left to the Colored Orphan Asylum, which reopened in Harlem in 1867. Most of the black CAS orphan train riders were placed in the early twentieth century—after Brace’s death—and were primarily found homes with African American farmers near New York City, many of them in Maryland and in Delaware, where, according to Charles Loring Brace Jr., the society placed its “less promising boys.”14
Although the racist elements in the CAS treatment of black children are fairly obvious from the perspective of the present day, during the entire orphan train era no one—not even Brace’s most bitter enemies—ever criticized the CAS for its handling of black children. According to the standards of the time, the society seemed only admirable. The same was true for the CAS handling of girls. Although the inadequacy and injustice of their treatment seems blatant today, it was never commented on during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In many ways girls, like blacks, were invisible children. No one saw who they really were, so no one understood what they really needed.
In July 1879 Emma Brace made her first solo voyage to Europe and her father sent her a letter of advice:
I want you to be very ambitious and eager for the best of things; to learn a great deal and get the best. Even the constant consideration required on such a trip will be a great gain for you. . . . Try to learn about each city something of its history and politics. Ask yourself why you like certain pictures, and choose the best before you know the artists. Analyze the architecture you like best, and try to recognize different schools of art. You should take a little pains with your letters to us. First give us a brief journal, then describe the things which strike you most in the most condensed form, and the small things;—use no conventional language, but the true expression.15
Brace was the son of a male feminist. All of his life he had known and respected brilliant, forthright women: the Beechers in his youth, George Eliot and Emma Lazarus, among many others, in his maturity. He had great respect for his wife’s intellectual abilities and wrote that he had learned a lot from her. He also set high standards for his daughter. He wanted her to be ambitious, to analyze and to learn, not just about art and architecture but about history and politics as well. But the feminism of the male Braces was limited by the cultural assumptions of their era. Charles wanted women to achieve the most in life, but only according to what he believed to be their nature. Women could and should be brilliant and strong, but Brace never considered for a moment that they could achieve a “manly” force of intellect or independence of will, nor that marriage was anything but the epitome of feminine achievement. With all of his respect and deep affection for Letitia, his letters to her could be as condescending as those to his daughter. Like the majority of Victorian men, Brace simply did not take women seriously—a fact that had disastrous consequences for many female orphan train riders.
Girls were so beneath consideration during the nineteenth century that CAS journal and record keepers—including Brace—referred to the orphan train riders almost exclusively as “boys” and “lads” even though 39 percent of them were girls.16 More significant was Brace’s difficulty recognizing girls’ successes. All of the cases cited in the brief section labled “Our Failures” in The Dangerous Classes related to girls, even though, in her retrospective study of 1922, Georgia Ralph determined that, according to Brace’s own standards, girls (with an average “favorable” placement rate of 74 percent) succeeded more often than boys (only 54 percent favorably placed).17 And, while Brace happily declared the Newsboys’ Lodging House an agency “of pure humanity and almost unmingled good,” the Girls’ Lodging House was written off as having “cost” the society “more trouble than all our enterprises together.”18 Brace’s opinion was forcefully underlined by the lodging house matrons, whose reports were often little more than catalogs of the misbehaviors they dealt with daily. What neither these women nor Brace understood was the degree to which that misbehavior and the “failures” of the lodging house were the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In The Dangerous Classes, Brace maintained that the street girl “feels homelessness and friendlessness more [than boys do]; and she has more of the feminine dependence on affection; the street trades, too, are harder for her, and the return at night to some lonely cellar or tenement room, crowded with dirty people of all ages and sexes, is more dreary.” Girls had a natural aversion to these crowded tenements, Brace believed, because their instinct was “more toward the preservation of purity.”19 But such assertions of feminine weakness and virtue were frequently followed in CAS literature by directly contradictory claims. In the first circular, for example, no sooner had Brace described girls as “more pitiable” than boys than he summed up their typical fate in two blunt sentences: “They grow up passionate, ungoverned; with no love or kindness ever to soften their heart. We all know their short, wild life; and the sad end.”20 And many of the behaviors that the lodging house matrons complained of revealed anything but feminine weakness, dependence, or preference for “purity.”
The primary complaint of Mrs. E. Trott, the first matron of the Girls’ Lodging House, was that her charges, especially those who worked in shops or factories, were too independent. “Her work through the day,” Trott asserted, “entirely unfits her for spending evenings as every true woman ought. She is neither inclined to sew nor read, but seeks some place of amusement. Again, she is unstable in business, and seeks to better her condition by changing her employment.”21 Trott’s successor, Mrs. E. S. Hurley, complained of “saucy, impudent, independent [girls,] who, though often smart, clean, industrious, and virtuous, are from their tempers and dispositions frequently thrown out of employment, and thus come to want,” Hurley especially despised
the wicked, designing, and dishonest girls who come [to the lodging house] to mislead or steal, and the vain silly, idle ones, bright and pretty, who go fluttering around trying to make life a holiday, but are so often caught in the net of the destroyer, and drawn down to misery and death. Restive under restraint, confident in their power to guide themselves, they can only be influenced through the affectionate natures they generally possess.22
Boys were almost never subjected to such categorical condemnation. On the contrary, their low morals, criminal associations, dishonesty, violence, and carelessness often inspired only a wink-and-nudge celebration, as in Brace’s previously quoted description of the typical street boy:
A more light-hearted youngster than the street-boy is not to be found. He is . . . merry as a clown, and always ready for the smallest joke, and quick to take “a point” or to return a repartee. His views of life are mainly derived from the more mature opinions of “flash-men,” engine-runners, cock-fighters, pugilists, and pickpockets, whom he occasionally is permitted to look upon with admiration at some select pothouse. . . . His morals are, of course, not of a high order, living, as he does, in a fighting, swearing, stealing, and gambling set. . . . [H]e is sharp and reckless.
Boys had to sink very low indeed to be seen as “failures,” whereas girls had only to act like boys and they were dismissed as “passionate,” “ungoverned,” “wild,” and doomed to a “sad end.” The fact that so many girls were as high-spirited and independent as boys seems to have had no effect on CAS (or Victorian society’s) notions of femininity. Such girls were simply held not to be, in Mrs. Trott’s words, “true women.” And, whereas the CAS sought nothing so much as to encourage boys’ independence, they attempted to make “true women” of girls by encouraging them to be subservient.
Trott considered domestic service far superior for girls to working in a shop or factory, because as a domesti
c, a girl “is surrounded with home comforts, and with a considerate mistress is well cared for; has one to take an interest in her welfare, advise and assist her when she needs it. She has also a true friend; for what girl that is honest, truthful, and studies the interests of her mistress is not highly valued?”23
The fact that the unequal relationship between a mistress and a self-sacrificing servant should be designated as “true” friendship says a lot about the CAS’s lack of respect for a girl’s more spontaneous and authentic affections. Brace, in fact, wanted girls to be sent west for domestic placement precisely so that their choice of friends would be limited:
[A] poor girl—a domestic—in one of our city or suburban families, though greatly raised above her former condition, does not improve to anything like the same degree as one in a country family. The great reason being in the power . . . of social influences, which here are entirely those of the kitchen and the servant class, while in the West they are those of the family and the American community.24
When a girl resisted her benefactors’ attempts to limit her freedom, rein in her passions, and control her friendships, she was not seen as independent or strong, but as manifesting the most dangerous form of female weakness—a fascination for what Brace called “the strange and mysterious subject of sexual vice.”25 Despite their supposed instinct “toward the preservation of purity,” girls were considered far less capable of resisting the promptings of the flesh than boys. Brace claimed that one of the “most dark arrangements of the world” was that
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