"An instructive and fascinating slice of social history...O'Connor, a creative-writing teacher, is at heart a storyteller." - USA Today March 1, 2001 -- USA Today

"[An] engaging and thoughtful history...immensely readable book." - Los Angeles Times, February 26, 2001 -- The Los Angeles Times

"A fascinating, important, and revealing commentary...a meticulous, overdure and serious look at a little-known chapter of history." -New York Daily News, February 18, 2001 -- Review

"A fascinating, important, and revealing commentary...a meticulous, overdure and serious look at a little-known chapter of history." -- New York Daily News, February 18, 2001

Prologue:
Working for Human Happiness



On the morning of October 1, 1854, forty-five children sat on the
front benches of a meetinghouse in Dowagiac, Michigan. Most were
between ten and twelve years old, though at least one was six and a
few were young teenagers. During the week the meetinghouse served as
a school, but on that day, a Sunday, it was a Presbyterian church,
and more than usually crowded, not only because the children had
taken so many seats, but because the regular parishioners had been
augmented by less devout neighbors curious to see the "orphans."
For the last couple of weeks notices had been running in the
newspapers, and bills had been posted at the general store, the
tavern, and the railroad station asking families to take in homeless
boys and girls from New York City. The children had arrived on the
train from Detroit at three that morning and had huddled together on
the station platform until sunup. They had spent the previous night
on a steamer crossing Lake Erie from Buffalo, New York, and not a one
of them
had avoided being soiled by seasickness -- their own or their fellow
passengers" -- or by the excreta of the animals traveling on the deck
above. The night before, they had slept on the floor of an absolutely
dark freight car, amid a crowd of German and Irish immigrants heading
west from Albany. During their first night out from New York
City, on a riverboat traveling up the Hudson, they had slept in
proper berths, with blankets and mattresses -- but only because the
boat"s captain, after hearing the tales they told of their lives, had
taken pity on them.
The children"s days of hard travel were clearly evident in their
pallor and the subtle deflation of their features. Their clothes --
which had been new when they left New York -- were stained and ripped
and emitted a distinct animal rankness. Their expressions were wary,
as if they had been caught doing something wrong and were wondering
whether they were going to be punished. In some of the younger
children this wariness verged on fear, but most of the older boys and
girls had known too much disappointment and loneliness to be afraid
of what was about to happen to them, or at least to reveal that fear,
even to themselves. Some of them cast glances -- challenging, or
ingratiating -- back at the men and women seated behind them; some
looked down at their shoes, while others stared straight ahead at the
young man beside the altar, whose enthusiasm, accent, and fluid
gestures marked him as a city preacher. His name was E. P. Smith, and
he was telling the audience about the organization he represented:
the Children"s Aid Society, which had been founded only one and a
half years earlier by a young minister named Charles Loring Brace.
Brace, a native of Hartford, Connecticut, had come to New York in
1848 to study theology and had been horrified both by the hordes of
vagrant children -- beggars, bootblacks, flower sellers, and
prostitutes -- who crowded the city"s streets and by the way civil
authorities treated them. Mass poverty was a new problem during that
era. Up through the early nineteenth century there had been no slums
in American cities. There had been poor people, of course, and run-
down houses on the back streets and disreputable taverns on the
waterfronts, but none of the large, decaying neighborhoods of fear
and despair that are so ubiquitous in urban America today. Beginning
shortly after the War of 1812, torrential immigration and the
nation"s uneasy transition to industrial capitalism had divided
American cities into hostile camps of the affluent and the
desperately poor. In no city was this division more pronounced than
New York, which started the nineteenth century with a population of
less than 40,000 and ended it with close to a million and a half. In
1849 New York"s first police chief reported that 3,000 children1 --
or close to 1 percent of the city"s total population -- lived on the
streets and had no place to sleep but in alleys and abandoned
buildings or under stairways. At first the au-thorities had dealt
with these vagrant children mainly by incarcerat-ing them in adult
prisons and almshouses, and then, beginning in the 1820s, by building
juvenile prisons and asylums, which were barely less harsh or
punitive.
Brace believed that most of these children were not criminals but
victims of miserable economic and social conditions. Incarceration
did nothing but "harden" them in the ways of crime. What they really
needed, he maintained, was education, jobs, and good homes -- and in
March 1853 he established an organization to provide them with just
such benefits.
During its first year the Children"s Aid Society primarily offered
its young beneficiaries religious guidance at Sunday meetings and
vocational and academic instruction at its industrial schools. It
also established the nation"s first runaway shelter, the Newsboys"
Lodging House, where vagrant boys received inexpensive room and board
and basic education. From the beginning Brace and his colleagues
attempted to find jobs and homes for individual children, but they
soon became overwhelmed by the numbers needing placement. Un-able to
raise enough money to increase his staff, Brace hit on the idea of
sending groups of children to the country and letting local residents
simply pick out the child they wanted for themselves. The forty-five
young people sitting in the Dowagiac meetinghouse were the first of
these groups -- and the first riders of what would come to be called
the "orphan trains."
As Smith explained the program to his audience, he appealed equally
to their consciences and pocketbooks. These were the "little ones of
Christ," he said, who had the same capacities, the same need of good
influences, and the same immortal soul as "our own" children. Kind
men and women who opened their homes to one of this "ragged regiment"
would be expected to raise them as they would their natural-born
children, providing them with decent food and clothing, a "common"
education, and $100 when they turned twenty-one. There would be no
loss in the charity, Smith assured his audience. The boys were handy
and active and would soon learn any common trade or labor. The girls
could be used for all types of housework.
When he had finished speaking, bench-legs squawked on the floorboards
and the congregation came forward to get a better look at the
children. Some of these men and women were shopkeepers, carpenters,
or blacksmiths, and one was a physician; most, however, were farmers.
Their faces were gaunt (only the wealthy were fat in the nineteenth
century) and reddened by sun, wind, and, in not a few cases, whiskey.
As they mingled with Smith"s party, some blinked back tears that such
innocents should already have known so much hardship, others looked
them up and down and asked questions, trying to assess their strength
and honesty, while one or two went so far as to squeeze the
children"s muscles or plunge a finger into their mouths to check
their teeth.
The actual distribution of the children commenced the following
morning at the tavern where they were staying. In an account of the
trip published by the Children"s Aid Society, Smith said that in
order to get a child, applicants had to have recommendations from
their pastor and a justice of the peace, but it is unlikely that this
requirement was strictly enforced. In the early days the society"s
agents tended to be very casual in both the acquisition and dispersal
of their charges. Smith himself had let a passenger on the riverboat
from Manhattan take one of the boys and had replaced him with another
he met in the Albany railroad yard -- a boy whose claim to orphanhood
Smith never bothered to verify. When applicants did not have the
required documents, Smith probably did what was done routinely by
later CAS agents: he looked at the quality and cleanness of the
applicants" clothes, asked them about their property, professions,
and church attendance, and, if he saw no evidence that they were
liars or degenerates, gave them a child.
By the end of that first day (a Monday), fifteen boys and girls had
gone to live with local farmers or craftsmen, and by Thursday
evening, twenty-two more had been taken. On Friday, Smith and the
eight unclaimed children -- the youngest and therefore the least able
workers -- continued west from Dowagiac by train. In Chicago, Smith
put them by themselves on a train to Iowa City (one and a half days"
journey), where a Reverend C. C. Townsend, who ran a local orphanage,
took them in and attempted to find them foster families. As for
Smith, he caught the first train back to New York.
Despite the fact that the Children"s Aid Society heard practically
nothing of most of these children ever again, this first expedition
was considered such a success that in January the society sent out
two more parties of homeless children, both to Pennsylvania. Over the
next seventy-five years the CAS orphan trains carried an estimated
105,000 children to all of the contiguous forty-eight states except
Arizona. For most of those years the children were distributed to
their new "parents" or "employers" (both terms were used) much as
they had been by E. P. Smith, through a sort of auction held in a
church, opera house, or large store. Applicants for children were
supposed to be screened by committees of local businessmen,
ministers, or physicians, but the screening was rarely very thorough.
The monitoring
of placements was equally lax. Because of the great difficulty and
expense of travel in nineteenth-century rural America, CAS agents
rarely checked up in person on the boys and girls they had placed.
The society tried to keep tabs on placements by sending both the
children and their foster parents regular letters of inquiry, but
these mostly went unanswered.
Sustained by a monitoring system that seriously underreported failure
and by a prodigious quantity of blind faith, Charles Loring Brace
tirelessly promoted what he called the "Emigration Plan" during his
thirty-seven years at the head of the Children"s Aid Society. In
moving and persuasive books, articles, speeches, and annual reports,
he portrayed his system of placing needy and orphaned children in
families as more humane and effective than even the best
institutional care, and also as vastly cheaper. As a result, Brace"s
system was imitated by many organizations, initially only in the East
but eventually all across the country. The New York Foundling
Hospital alone sent some 30,000 children west.
All told, by 1929, when the CAS sent its last true orphan train to
Texas, roughly 250,000 city children had found foster homes through
these programs. Some of these children were abused by their new
families in all the ways that we are familiar with from present-day
news reports about the tragedies of foster care, and some were just
as happy as the literature of their placement agencies said they
were. Two boys placed by the CAS became governors, one became a
Supreme Court justice, and several others became mayors, congressmen,
or local representatives. Many children grew up to become drifters
and thieves, and at least one became a murderer. The vast majority
led lives of absolutely ordinary accomplishment and satisfaction. And
many, perhaps also a majority (because there is nothing extraordinary
about unhappiness), saw no end to the misery into which they had been
born.

This book concentrates on the CAS orphan trains, not only because the
society placed considerably more children over a much longer period
than any other agency, but because Charles Loring Brace almost single-
handedly forged the philosophical foundations of the movement, and of
many other efforts on behalf of poor children, and remains to this
day perhaps the preeminent figure in American child welfare history.
Until well into the twentieth century, virtually every program
seeking to help homeless and needy children was either inspired by or
a response to Brace"s work and ideas. His notion that children are
better cared for by families than in institutions is the most basic
tenet of present-day foster care. And his abiding belief in the
capability and fundamental goodness of poor city children, while
occasionally echoed in the speeches of politicians and child welfare
experts, is one that our nation dearly needs to reclaim.
Brace was an exceedingly hardworking, intelligent, and complex man
whose life can hardly be defined by his work with the Children"s Aid
Society. He was jailed in Hungary for supposed revolutionary
activities, and he was a prominent abolitionist, author, and
journalist. As a New York Times correspondent during the Civil War,
he was present at some of the Union Army"s most stunning early
defeats. Brace"s best friend for much of his young manhood was
Frederick Law Olmsted, the celebrated designer of Central Park, and
his social contacts included Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, and George Eliot.
With all of his drive and accomplishment, Brace was a man of many
contradictions. He was ferociously ambitious, yet believed that
ambition was a sin. He constantly excoriated himself for not living
up to his own ideals -- for not working hard enough, loving well
enough, or having motives that were pure enough -- but he never seems
to have doubted the exemplariness of his character. He could speak
quite openly about his "abounding courage and hope." He proclaimed
without the slightest shred of irony, "I am striving after perfect
truth," and admitted, as if it were only self-evident, that "few
human beings have ever had a more real sense of things unseen than I
habitually have." And yet he believed that virtue existed only in
humility and self-denial. He wanted always to live more simply and to
endure greater hardship. What he called his "brightest of all
visions" was "a humble, self-controlled life, all devoted, given up,
to working for human happiness."2
As much as Brace"s work with the Children"s Aid Society may have
satisfied his desire for prestige and power, it was nevertheless the
single greatest moral effort of his life. In simplest terms, this
book
is an attempt to measure the virtue of that effort by examining its
motives and by tracing its consequences, both during Brace"s lifetime
and after. The earliest chapters explore what in Brace"s experiences
and era made the idea of sending even small children hundreds of
miles from home to live with total strangers seem natural and good.
Later chapters discuss the successes and failures of Brace"s efforts,
and those of his imitators, and show how changing ideas of childhood,
work, bondage, and the nature of society caused what had once seemed
an act of nearly unassailable wisdom and compassion to ap-pear
cruelly indifferent to the very children it had been designed to help.
The true measure of the virtue of Brace"s effort lies in its effect
on the lives of these children. This book illustrates that effect by
looking at the fates of orphan train riders in aggregate, and by
telling the stories of particular children: John Jackson, who at five
years old walked off after a marching band and never found his way
home again; a lame street peddler named Johnny Morrow, who won over
the Children"s Aid Society staff by fulfilling their most sentimental
fantasies; Lotte Stern, a ragpicker"s fourteen-year-old daughter who,
like so many girls of her time, was forced into prostitution and then
damned for it by society; John Brady and Andrew Burke, who rode the
same orphan train in 1859 and became, respectively, the governors of
Alaska and North Dakota; and Charley Miller, who shot two young men
dead on a boxcar in Wyoming because, as he put it at his trial, he
was lonely and cold and so far from home.

A cautionary note: although the term "orphan trains" has a poetic
resonance and a degree of recognition that made it the all-but-
inevitable title for this book, in some ways it misrepresents the
placement efforts of the CAS and other agencies. During the orphan
train era itself, none of these agencies ever actually used the term
in their official publications. The CAS referred to its relevant
division first as the Emigration Department, then as the Home-Finding
Department, and finally, as the Department of Foster Care. The
Foundling Hospital sent out what it called "baby" or "mercy" trains.
And almost everybody else referred to the practice as "family
placement" or "out-placement" ("out" to distinguish it from the
placement of children "in" orphanages or asylums). The term "orphan
trains" may have been coined by a journalist sometime in the early
twentieth century, but it did not come into its present wide currency
until long after the close of the era, perhaps as recently as 1978,
when CBS aired a fictional miniseries entitled The Orphan Trains.
One reason the term was not used by placement agencies was that less
than half of the children who rode the trains were in fact orphans,
and as many as 25 percent had two living parents. Children with both
parents living ended up on the trains -- or in orphanages -- because
their families did not have the money or desire to raise them or be-
cause they had been abused or abandoned or had run away. And many
teenage boys and girls went to orphan train sponsoring organizations
simply in search of work or a free ticket out of the city.
The term "orphan trains" is also misleading because a substantial
number of the placed-out children never took the railroad to their
new homes, or even traveled very far. Although the majority of
children placed by the CAS went to the Midwest and West, the state
that received the greatest number by far (nearly one-third of the
total) was New York; Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania also
received substantial numbers of children. The main goal of the
Emigration Plan was to remove children from slums, where
opportunities were scant and "immoral influences" plentiful, and to
place them in "good Christian homes." In part because Brace
considered the country fundamentally more beneficent, and in part
because the demand for children (as laborers and for adoption) was
always highest in the least-settled areas, the typical good Christian
home was a farm. But the CAS did place many children not only near
New York but right in the city itself.
What is more, for most of the orphan train era, the CAS bureaucracy
made no distinction between local placements and even its most
distant ones. They were all written up in the same record books and,
on the whole, managed by the same people. Also, the same child might
be placed one time in the West and the next time -- if the first home
did not work out -- in New York City. The decision about where to
place a child was made almost entirely on the basis of which
alternative was most readily available at the moment the child needed
help.
Because distant and local placements were so functionally
interchangeable, discussing only what might be called "classic"
orphan train placement -- groups of children distributed far from New
York City -- would distort the nature and goals of orphan train
programs and misrepresent the experiences of many of the placed
children. Such a focus would also obscure the fact that, in an
important sense, the orphan train era never ended. What really
happened is that during the first decades of the twentieth century,
as a result of demographic, political, and social changes, fewer and
fewer children were sent to homes in other states and more and more
were placed locally. Decades before the last orphan train left for
Texas, all of the main placement organizations -- including the CAS --
had become primarily what we would call foster care and adoption
agencies. But for the people operating these agencies, the
transformation was only in how they did their work (more screening
and monitoring of placements), not in the work"s fundamental nature
and goals.
It is important -- even consummately important -- not to obscure the
connection between the orphan trains and our own child welfare
programs, because the consequences of Brace"s moral effort end -- if
they may be said to have ended at all -- only now, in this moment,
and in each succeeding moment, as we ourselves decide what we can and
should do to help the "poor and friendless" children of our own time.
It is my hope that, as we discover how well or ill Brace and his
followers promoted the happiness of children during the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, we will better understand how we might
serve those children who most need our help at the start of this new
millennium.

Copyright © 2001 by Stephen O"Connor