Orphan Trains

by Stephen O'Connor

  Brace also advocated vigorously, along with many other New York reformers, for the passage of the 1875 Children’s Law, perhaps the most significant piece of child welfare legislation passed in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The law forbade committing children between the ages of three and sixteen to county almshouses, the underfunded and poorly run institutions that had been the subject of severe criticism by child welfare advocates for many years. In 1856 state-sponsored investigators had condemned the almshouses as “the worst possible nurseries” and “the most disgraceful memorials of public charity.”5 Critics asserted that children—who might have been incarcerated along with their parents, or on their own for vagrancy—were often mistreated by adult inmates and were always subjected to their “vicious” influence. Critics also condemned the lack of competent staff. There were no teachers at most almshouses, and as a cost-cutting measure, children were generally cared for only by unpaid elderly female inmates. Most of the law’s advocates—who, like many on the right today, believed that poverty was a prima facie disqualification for parenthood—hoped that the children excluded from the almshouses would be placed with foster families. But the vast majority of them ended up in orphanages and other institutions. That said, in 1875 the CAS placed more children—4,026—than in any year before or after.6

  As well as things were going during this half-decade, Brace did suffer several major losses and setbacks, the most severe of which was the death of his father in October 1872.

  John Pierce Brace had been ill for some years, suffering from rheumatism that kept him confined to a wheelchair, and from a dementia that left him unable to remember the names of close friends and family. When he had grown too ill to take care of himself, he had retired to Litchfield, to live in his aunts Mary and Sarah Pierce’s old house, which had been left to him on Mary’s death. Right until the very end he spent almost all of his time in his library, reading and attending to his naturalist’s cabinets. Charles made regular visits to Litchfield but, as a result of a delayed telegram, was not able to attend his father on his deathbed. He wrote to his old friend Fred Kingsbury of his “intense disappointment. . . . No father ever did more for his son. He was a man of vast acquirements, and he sacrificed everything for his children. . . . Every time I left him I expected his departure. He has left a sweet and noble memory, and I only pray that I may do one-tenth as much for my children.”7 John Brace also left behind a respectable estate of some $70,000, mostly acquired during his tenure as editor of the Hartford Courant. Charles used his share of the money to build a house he called Ches-knoll on a steep hillside overlooking the Hudson, just above the village of Dobbs Ferry.

  Even as Brace was being celebrated as both author and reformer, he and the CAS were subjected to a series of vexing public humiliations. In 1871, at a time when the society was $90,000 in debt owing to the construction of a new lodging, $30,000 in state appropriations was put at risk by accusations leveled by H. Friedgen, the earnest if ill-educated CAS agent who had escorted John Brady and Andrew Burke to Indiana.

  Friedgen had left the CAS to work for the Commissioners of Charity, only to be fired shortly afterward for writing what the New York Times called “an abusive letter.” When the CAS refused to rehire him, Friedgen apparently sought revenge by exposing the society to a committee headed by the state senator William “Boss” Tweed, the infamous leader of Tammany Hall, who was himself on the verge of an exposure that would send him to jail and end his career. Friedgen mostly made already familiar accusations: that the society commonly placed Catholic children with Protestant families who then changed the children’s religion and names; that Protestant clergymen frequently spoke at lodging house meetings; and that “large boys” (over fourteen) often came back to the city from western placements—all charges that were manifestly accurate, but that Friedgen mysteriously withdrew under cross-examination.

  The only new charges, ones that both the Times and the Tribune called “severe” but did not specify, were made against Mr. E. Trott, the superintendent of the Girls’ Lodging House. When called upon to testify, Brace flatly dismissed the accusations as “slander” and “hearsay,” utterly unsupported by the facts, and said (echoing the “blame the victim” responses to sexual assault in the “Record Books”) that the charges against Trott “had come from girls of bad character and had never reached the ears of officials of the Society.” The newspapers all gave absolute credence to Brace’s defense and painted disparaging portraits of Friedgen; the Tribune went so far as to label him “a most extraordinary scoundrel.”8 The Tweed commission apparently agreed in the end and, after a frustrating bureaucratic delay, granted the CAS its appropriation.

  In 1872 an angry father sued the Brooklyn Children’s Aid Society for “abducting” his eighteen-year-old son. Like many other orphan train riders, the boy, William Nash, had taken advantage of the society’s semi-willful credulity to run away from home. He had given the Brooklyn CAS agents a false name, told them he was an orphan, and in short order found himself on a train headed west. The Brooklyn City Court refused to sustain the father’s complaint against the CAS, in part because the agents had not known the boy’s true identity, but also because, as the judge put it, “the enticement to travel and find new homes which is held out by a children’s aid society, and sanctioned by the statute incorporating it, is not an unlawful enticement or solicitation.”9

  Despite the favorable decision, both the New York and the Brooklyn societies became much more careful about where and how they got their orphan train riders. They entirely gave up the practice of sending “visitors” into poor neighborhoods to garner emigrants and increasingly took children only from the Randall’s Island nursery, the Juvenile Asylum, the New York Orphan Asylum, and other congregate care institutions. Those children who came to the CAS through its lodging houses and schools were scrutinized more thoroughly than ever before. But the fact remains that, in an era of scanty and inaccessible public records, there was often no way to tell whether a poker-faced child was telling the truth or lying. And despite these precautions, the CAS suffered many similar suits and complaints from parents in the ensuing years.

  The charges made by the former agent Friedgen and the suit by Nash’s father did little, however, to damage the CAS’s reputation. It was Brace’s own behavior that, in the winter of 1874, caused the New York newspapers and a substantial portion of the city’s reform establishment to turn against him. During a period of great economic uncertainty and severe cold, Brace wrote an article criticizing the “Soup Kitchen Movement” for “pauperizing” its beneficiaries by giving them something for nothing. This harsh stance outraged journalists and many members of the public who had grown used to thinking of Brace as the very model of charitableness. The campaign of “violent abuse” put such a “bitter strain” on him that it was remembered in eulogies occasioned by his death a decade and a half later.10

  None of these hardships, however, seemed to diminish Brace’s enthusiasm or satisfaction in the least. Even in the midst of a letter referring to his villainization in the press, Brace could still declare: “My life has been exceptionally happy, especially in my profession and home enjoyments.”11

  Ten years have now tested the soundness and wisdom of our plan of operations. . . . If the objection had been well founded, that we were “scattering the seeds of vice and crime” through the West, in sending out these unfortunate little creatures, there would have arisen from the whole West, an united groan of opposition to our movement. The fact is, however, that . . . the West has never contributed so liberally to our charity, or has called for so many children, as during the last year.

  —Charles Loring Brace, 186412

  At the 1874 meeting of the National Prison Reform Congress, Brace was forced once again to confront criticism he thought he had put behind him. A delegate from Wisconsin, probably Hiram H. Giles, responded to a report by Brace on “preventive and reformatory work among children” by declaring that as a result of the CAS’
s transport of “criminal juveniles, . . . vagabonds and gutter snipes,” the people of Wisconsin would be better off “building cheap jails, instead of so expensive churches; or State Industrial schools for boys instead of State Universities.” He continued: “[I]t is a misdemeanor to scatter and sow noxious weeds on the prairies and in the openings of Wisconsin, but it is ‘Moral Strategy’ to annually scatter three thousand obnoxious, ‘ironclad orphans,’ juvenile criminals among the peaceful homes and in the quiet neighborhoods of the state.”13 At a meeting of the National Conference of Charities and Correction (NCCC) in Detroit the following year, Giles made clear that western resentment of eastern political and economic dominance played a role in the reaction against outplacement: “[W]hile we cannot resist the bringing among us of these street waifs, we can and do most earnestly protest against it.”14

  Although Brace had always presented the placement communities as universally eager to share their bounty with New York’s neediest children, many western politicians and editorialists had objected to the Emigration Plan, its beneficiaries, and its agents from the very beginning. The Reverend C. C. Townsend, whom Johnny Morrow had visited in Iowa City, had been required by the county board to put up a $5,000 bond to “indemnify the county against any loss it may sustain, by supporting any of the orphan children or foundlings which he has brought, or may hereafter bring into the county.” And perhaps because Townsend never paid the bond, the board forbade him, in June 1867, to bring any more “street outcasts of large cities” into the county.15

  The Emigration Plan was also attacked in the West on considerably less selfish grounds. In 1858 an Illinois editorialist portrayed the orphan trains as little more than slavery:

  If some Missionary Agent had taken that many little negroes from the plantations of Louisiana to Springfield or Jacksonville, and should have prepared to do the very thing with them that everybody knows will be done directly or indirectly with these poor children from New York, our good abolitionist friends . . . would all have fainted at the horrid thought.16

  Prior to Giles’s address, Brace had, for the most part, been able to ignore such protests because they had remained a local matter and had not been given serious hearing at the highest levels of the charity and social reform establishment. He responded to Giles’s criticisms as he had to those of 1858—by ordering an in-house investigation, this one conducted by Charles Fry, a CAS agent based in the West. Brace did not attend the following year’s meeting of the Conference of Charities and Correction. Instead, Moore Dupuy, a CAS representative, read a paper by Brace and announced Fry’s findings. In the paper Brace contradicted Giles’s assertions by saying the vagrant children sent west were not “the children of criminals, but of honest people made suddenly unfortunate [who had been] nursed by care and want and poverty [but had only] picked up the external bad habits of the street.”17

  Fry had investigated three states: Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. Of the 6,000 children who had been sent to Indiana over the previous twenty years, Fry found only five who had been incarcerated in reform schools. One of these children was a girl who had been released several times but had always gotten into trouble again and was, he concluded, “no doubt the source of many charges against the ‘placing out’ system.” As for Illinois and Michigan, which had received 5,000 and 4,000 children each, not a single child had turned up in any of the states’ penal or reform institutions.18

  Although Brace concluded, at least for public consumption, that the Fry report proved “the charges made in the Prison Congress were almost baseless,”19 his critics argued that the report—and Brace’s “no news is good news” defense—were invalid because prison records said nothing about where inmates had lived, but only about where they had happened to be living at the moment of arrest. So any CAS child who had left his or her placement could not be detected. The controversy was far from settled, but it quieted down for most of another decade. And when the controversy did resume, it would be in association with a wholly new line of argument, one that Brace would find particularly difficult to resist.

  It is a curious fact of history that substantial cultural shifts can build slowly over generations, without being recognized, and then spring full-blown into the public consciousness, as if out of the blue. The Gay Liberation Movement, for example, had been building unnoticed, underground, at least since the era of Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde, and had gathered steam during the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, and then exploded onto the streets with the Stonewall Riot of 1969 and permanently changed the American social landscape.

  During the very year when Brace first had to deal with the criticism of Hiram H. Giles, a similar sea-change took place in American attitudes toward children, a change that would permanently diminish Brace’s stature before his peers and the judges of history. The catalyst for this sea-change was a case of child abuse not unlike countless other incidents of cruelty to children throughout history—except for the attention it garnered.

  In April 1874 eight-year-old Mary Ellen Wilson was escorted into a New York City courtroom by an Officer McDougall of the New York Police Department. Despite the chill in the morning air, she wore only a calico dress and was barefoot, but someone had given her a carriage blanket to hold around her shoulders. Her eyes were darting, observant, and showed intelligence, but in the words of a New York Times reporter, she also seemed “care-worn, stunted and prematurely old.”

  When she took the stand, Elbridge Gerry, legal counsel to the recently established American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), asked her about a partially healed wound that ran across her face from forehead to cheek, just beside her eye, and she explained that one day when she had been attempting to help her “mamma” with some quilting, the woman had grown dissatisfied and slashed her with a pair of open scissors. The little girl also testified that as far back as she could remember she had been kept locked up in her family’s two-room apartment all day long and had been allowed into the backyard only at night. Her bed was “a piece of carpet stretched on the floor underneath a window.” She could remember having only one pair of shoes in her whole life. Her mother had beaten her “almost every day” with a whip or a cane, and the welts, scabs, and bruises on her legs and arms were plainly visible to the court audience. In answer to Gerry’s final questions, she said:

  I have no recollection of ever having been kissed by any one—have never been kissed by mamma. I have never been taken on my mamma’s lap and caressed or petted. I never dared to speak to anybody, because if I did I would get whipped. I have never had, to my recollection, any more clothing than I have at present. . . . I have seen stockings and other clothes in our room, but was not allowed to put them on. Whenever mamma went out I was locked up in the bedroom. I do not know for what I was whipped—mamma never said anything to me when she whipped me. I do not want to go back to live with mamma, because she beats me so. I have no recollection of ever being on the street in my life.20

  Like many of the children who come to the attention of child welfare authorities, then and now, Mary Ellen had a complicated history. Her “mamma” was not her biological mother but the widowed wife of her father, Thomas MacCormack. For several years during his marriage MacCormack had had an affair with a woman named Wilson, who had borne him three children, and given them all over to a “baby farmer.”

  Baby farmers were a particularly unscrupulous form of entrepreneur who took advantage of Victorian working-class women’s lack of financial independence and terror of appearing “unrespectable” or “fallen.” Most baby farmers were women who, for a monthly fee, would take in unwanted infants and care for them. Baby farmers would claim to seek adoptive parents for their charges, but such adoptions almost never happened. If the monthly payments stopped, the most pernicious baby farmers would simply let the infant die, although it was also common for baby farmers to continue to collect payments for children even after they had died of natural (or less than natural) causes. There is nothing on r
ecord about the fate of MacCormack and Wilson’s other two children, but when the eight-dollar monthly payments for Mary Ellen ceased shortly after the little girl’s first birthday, the woman caring for her simply dumped her at the Department of Charities.

  MacCormack also had three children by his wife Mary, but each of these had died as an infant. So when he heard, somehow, that Mary Ellen had been dumped by the baby farmer, he and his wife went to the Department of Charities to collect her. Mary knew just who the child was and presumably agreed to take her in as some sort of substitute for her own lost children.

  No one at the Department of Charities ever asked the couple about those children, or how they had died. No one knew of Thomas’s relationship to Mary Ellen—or of Mary’s for that matter. No one looked into their background in any way. The MacCormacks were simply given indenture papers to sign, and they walked home with the little girl in their arms. And then Thomas MacCormack promptly died, leaving his widow with little more than the responsibility of raising another woman’s child. She does not seem to have grieved overlong, however, for she married Francis Connolly when Mary Ellen was too young to remember ever living without him.