Biography section

I’m done with making excuses for the poor quality and transitions among sections. The point of this is to get them up and in public so that I can move on to the next section. Then I will clean them all up afterwards. (altho, I will mention that a few cites and footnotes are not present)

Today I have for you a brief biographical sketch of Charles Loring Brace (CLB) and a few comments on Brace, Emerson, and the founding of the Children’s Aid Society. I think my point was to connect the two but to not argue that some profound biographical link exists. They are not best friends, not even close. Rather, and I may need to strengthen this argument either here or in other parts of the dissertation (like ye olde introductione), I wish to show CLB as part of the way in which Emersonianism has infected and inflected other areas of life, particularly of reform, and to ask what it looks like there. In otherwords, the point about Emerson’s influence on Brace probably will stand or fall not on the biographical argument but on my reading of Brace’s writing. If you don’t believe me after that, then I’ve got a problem.

I also feel like I need to say more about a number of things--the CAS’s organization and founding, how I’m using The Dangerous Classes of New York as my main text for this chapter, and more about Brace’s connections with Transcendentalism more generally (ie the Olmsteads, Beechers, etc). As I said, though, I’ll leave those concerns for the revisions. For now, forward we go...

Oh, and coming soon: a few words about Darwin and self-reliance.

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        Daniel Aaron could have had Charles Loring Brace in mind when he claims in Men of Good Hope that “the men and women who made up th[e] transcendental corps [of second generation transcendentalist reformers] were mostly of New England origin.... It was this group that, disgusted by the prevailing materialism of the day, turned to culture and to reform” (15). Brace turned to a career in reform, like Emerson to his own career, only after turning away from an education and a position as a minister. But, first, Brace came to New York City and to the work of “child-saving” in good transcendentalist fashion--his family, his life, and his intellectual development all directed him towards a life embracing and activating Emersonian ideas. Charles Loring Brace was born on June 19, 1826 in Litchfield, Connecticut to a family steeped in transcendental circles. Charles’ mother, Lucy Porter, was Lyman Beecher’s sister-in-law, and the Beechers would continue to affect and be influenced by the Braces througout Charles’ life: his parents lived in the home of Lyman Beecher from their marriage in 1820 until 1822, when they built a house nearby after John Brace took on a position at the Litchfield Academy. At Litchfield, John Brace would teach Harriet Beecher, including assigning her her first essays, and introduce more rigorous academic subjects to the curriculum of the female school, including “science, higher mathematics, logic, and Latin” (O’Connor 8). In 1833, the family moved to Hartford, where John Brace, Charles’ father, became the principle at the Hartford Female Seminary, which was founded by Catharine Beecher in 1823.

         Brace’s exposure to Transcendental ideas came in an important way through his father, who was not just an educator but also the editor of the Hartford Courant. After Lucy passed away in 1840, leaving Brace what he would later call an “half-orphan,” John Brace, was left to raise his children alone. Charles grew up “very much under his father’s eye,” according to his daughter Emma’s comments in her 1894 memoir of her father, The Life of Charles Loring Brace (4). John Brace encouraged Charles’ intellectual curiosity, sometimes even seeming to “neglect his seminary students” to devote more time to his own son (O’Connor 17). O’Connor notes how, “for two hours every day, until Charles was 14, John read to [Charles] from the classic works of Greek, Roman, European, and American history, interspersing them with selections from Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott” (17). John Brace was himself a well-educated and liberal teacher, and at the Female Seminary, John Brace implemented a decidely feminist “educational agenda” (O’Connor 8).

        Charles grew into a precocious child in this intellectual and “Transcendental hothouse” (PHRASE TAKEN FROM SOMEWHERE, FIND IT CITE). He was known for asking his father so many questions over dinner that the roast would often “grow cold” while John Brace answered his son’s questions. The students of the female seminary, after a number of dinners with more than enough questions and not enough warm food, once threatened Charles that “if he did not stay away with his questions, he should be kissed” (Life 4). The terrors of young affection aside, Marilyn Holt concludes that Brace’s “family was comfortable in its financial and social status” (41). Charles Brace later recalled that he was himself happiest in Hartford during “my trouting, my ramblings over mountains and by willow-fringed brooks, all my ecstasies over fresh green meadows and waving woods and bright flowers and trout streams” (17). It was, again, his father, who took Charles on many of these “trouting” expeditions, but the love of nature was to be a sustaining force in Charles Brace’s often city-bound life. As an older man, he would routinely vacation by taking long trips in the various wildernesses (EXPAND), and when he moved, in 1848, to New York City to study at Union Theological Seminary, the 22 year-old Brace, who had lived his entire life in that small Connecticut town, wrote that he would not “enjoy studying in New York for [more than] a year.... The novelty must wear way then” (58). In fact, Brace survived his early years in New York City Brace by spending almost every weekend recuperating on his friend Frederick Law Olmstead’s nearby farm on Staten Island, which Olmstead had named “South Side”.

        Given Brace’s love of nature and his growth in Connecticut, it should come as no surprise that as a young man he became enamored of Horace Bushnell’s work, particularly after he left home for Yale College in 1842. This connection was established early in both Bushnell’s career and Brace’s life. As O’Connor explains, the 15 year-old Brace attended a delivery of the sermon “Unconscious Influence” “at North Congregational Church on February 20, 1842” (19). This sermon contains the “core ideas” for Bushnell’s most famous work, Christian Nurture, a text that discusses Christian childrearing, a life-long concern for Charles Brace (19). When published in 1847, Christian Nurture earned Bushnell the condemnation of many Congregationalists, though he avoided an official sanction for his claims that rigorous Calvinist doctrines led to overly negative view of children and thus to poor childrearing. In Bushnell we can see a broad base for Brace’s lifelong concern with children and his fundamental belief that the family is the best image of God’s love for humanity. As Brace put it in a letter to a “Miss Blake” (“one of his circle,” as Emma describes her), “It does seem to me the government of a State does not present the best type of God’s government.... But there is a government on earth which much more nearly, in my opinion, corresponds to God’s--...I mean Family Government. A father governs by love,” Brace concludes. This focus on a love, Brace argues, leads a father to make decisions that might be against a law (by, say, suspending a deserved punishment) but with the more moral aim of improving the child (when the father knows that the “repentence is sincere”) (Life 42-46).

        Brace continued at Yale and then at Yale Divinity School until 1848, when he tranferred to the more liberal Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In New York, Brace took on a series of teaching and writing jobs. “He taught Latin at the Rutgers Institute” and wrote for the New York Daily Times and the Independent, which was a “Congregationalist newspaper associated with Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn,” continuing Brace’s connection with the Beecher family and solidifying his credentials within the Congregationalist establishment in New York (39). Then, in 1849, Brace began his first serious missionary work when he became the minister to residents of the New York Charity Hospital on Blackwell’s Island. The hospital had men’s and women’s wards, as well as a separate ward for children, and while Brace’s work was primarily with the terminally ill patients in the women’s wards, he still became concerned about the children he saw there. He wrote, to his own terminally ill sister Emma, with a keen sense of both his coming purpose and his typical sympathy for nature and natural observation: “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.... New York is whirling on as usual. You 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!” (82).

        This was to be the last time that Brace would write to his sister Emma, who passed away in February of 1850, but it was not the last time that he would connect the children of New York with those in Connecticut. Brace’s own childhood constantly mingled with his observations of the children around him. In the Seventh Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society, Brace opens by saying that “there is something about childish poverty that touches almost everyone... We recall our own childhood; how keenly even a harsh look or word was felt; how sensitive we were to kindness and affection; how easily moulded to evil or to good” (3). After Emma’s death, Brace took leave of New York and the United States and went on a trip to Europe with his friends Frederick and John Olmstead. When Brace returned to new York in 1851, he would take up what he called “practical work,” and enter into a career as a “city missionary” (154).

BRACE AND EMERSON AND THE FOUNDING OF THE CAS

        In Men of Good Hope, Daniel Aaron claims that “[Theodore] Parker is the link between Emerson and the post-war reformers,” and Parker, a member of the Transcendental Club and a fiery Unitarian minister, reveals a direct line between Emerson and Brace (22). Brace was a committed abolitionist, and he had been so from the youngest age when both his father and Bushnell influenced him in the direction of abolition. In fact, he would later marry Robert Neill’s daughter Letitia. Robert Neill was “a passionate opponent of American slavery who had played host [in Blefast] to many abolitionists on European speaking tours” (50). So when Brace met Parker at Yale, the two made common cause in both their theology and their politics. Brace would serve the Union cause during the war with his pen, contributing articles to many New York and New England papers, but in the years before the coming storm, he corresponded with Parker frequently and at length during his studies, travels, and later work with the CAS.

        In a letter, from 1853, the year in which Brace would accept his appointment as Secretary of the CAS, Brace asks Parker to thank Emerson for “what he has done” for Brace’s life and work (Life 176). Brace continues by claiming that he “can scarcely think of a teacher to whom [he] owe[s] more” than Emerson (177). Emerson mostly “taught” Brace though print, but they also corresponded and they met on many occasions. Brace traveled to Concord and visited with Emerson, but more often he played host during Emerson’s frequent trips to New York to lecture. Emerson’s first trip to New York, in 1842, predated Brace’s arrival, but his frequent lecture tours in the 1840s and 1850s covered much of New England and often included New York City. Brace even established a sort of transcendental breakfast club of his own at his New York home, gathering together many of the visiting reformers and lecturers for conversation and food. Emma Brace writes that “Mr. Emerson was ever faithful [to join her father for breakfast] when on visits to New York” (211).

        Nevertheless, it would be wrong to conclude that Emerson and Brace were good friends. They were acquaintances in their personal lives, but there was something stronger connecting them. Even someone as charismatic and self-assured as Theodore Parker was quick to point to Emerson as a sort of oracle or inspiration. As Daniel Aaron writes, “Parker was only speaking the truth when he wrote to Emerson in 1851: “Much of the little I do now is the result of seed of your own sowing.’” (21) Emerson sowed the seeds, and he sowed them widely during his lecture tours and due to the success of his publications and his ideas. During Brace’s time in Berlin in 1851, John Olmstead wrote to Brace: “We want ten thousand such apostles of ideas as you to come and work [here in New York City], and work against the material tendency that is swamping us. That will be your exact post when you return, to direct the fierce energies here, to lead toward divine things, to join Emerson in his work, [but] in a different way, to speak a word, and never cease speaking a word, for ideas” (Life 109).

        While Brace would speak a word for ideas often in his writings and correspondence, which would range over numerous diverse and idiosyncratic subjects, his work would become uniquely Emersonian. But he would not be entirely alone. A group of these like-minded men and women, these transcendental reformers, came together in New York City in January of 1853 to discuss the terrifying situation of the poor and orphaned children of their city. This group chose Brace to hold the first year-long appointment as secretary of the Children’s Aid Society of New York, a position he would continue to hold until his death in 1890. At the time Brace, not even two years returned from his travels, was a “rapidly rising literary and political figure on the New York scene,” according to Stephen O’Conner (82). Brace had written two monographs in the preceding year, Home-Life in Germany, which would be published later in 1853, and Hungary in 1851, which had come out the previous year in 1852. Hungary in 1851 details Brace’s month-long imprisonment in Hungary under chages that he was supporting democratic revolutionaries like Lajos Kossuth. In truth, Brace simply had a couple of pamphlets written in English in his posession, including one that “had a picture of Kossuth as a frontispiece” (O’Connor 61). Brace eventually won his release through the intervention of a Catholic priest and the American consul, but upon his return to New York, the publication of his travelogue burnished his credentials as an activist and writer. It was his second book that would solidify Brace as an expert on working with children.

        In Home-Life in Germany Brace again wrote of his experiences traveling in Europe, but rather than politics he focuses on the institution of the German “Rauhe Haus,” or the Rough House, “a residential school for vagrant children outside of Hamburg” (O’Connor 52). Brace, who preferred to call the Rauhe Haus “A Home among the Flowers” because of its rural setting, was affected by the way in which this German institution “attempt[ed] to approximate natural home life” of a family (54). The man who had earlier written that a family was the best metaphor for a system of government based on Christian principles, now found a way to implement that system for saving children. Children were raised not in large orphanages with all of the stony coldness of what Brace called the institutional “Asylum interest,” but in smaller groups centered around a farm that the children helped to work. Two things that would later become very influential on the CAS became clear to Brace here in Germany: first, that children could be given useable farming skills in the rural setting of the Rauhe Haus, thus increasing their self-reliance in later life, and, second, there were salutory effects brought about by the effort to approximate a normal home life for orphaned children. O’Connor concludes that “what most appealed to Brace [about the Rauhe Haus] was that [it] required the poor to make some contribution toward the benefits they received, so that their character was not destroyed by becoming dependent on mere charity” (55). In otherwords, Brace admired the ways in which the Rauhe Haus required and developed something quite like Emersonian self-reliance.

        So Brace came to the organizational meeting of the Children’s Aid Society of New York as a repected author on children’s charity work with a demonstrated preference to put into action Emerson’s ideal of self-reliance, an ideal that Brace developed both in practice and through contact with many of the Transcendentalists of his day. What was more, Brace was a young, active man with a keen sense of Christian purpose and a firm understanding that “working with children was ‘prevention’ because they had not yet been infected by the evils of their environment...[and that they] were also more malleable than their parents” (76). Under Brace’s leadership, according to Clay Gish, the CAS became “the pre-eminent child-saving organization of the nineteenth century” and its emigration program of “Orphan Trains” became “one of the most influential, far-reaching, and controversial programs in the child-saving movement (121). “Like [Emerson],” Aaron continues, “they [the next generation of “middle-class reformers”] made the flowering of the individual personality their ultimate goal and estimated all political and social ideologies, whether conservative or radical, by this single test” (18). It is my contention that Brace and the CAS implemented Emersonian notions of self-reliance and friendship in their child-saving efforts, thus constructing children (primarily “boys”) as self-reliant individuals who needed training and love to be able to play their role as citizen in this new democratic moment. Brace and the CAS clearly depended on other prominent discourses, but nonetheless, Emersonian democratic friendship was importantly at work in their efforts. As Aaron says, Brace had, as we shall see, a “single test” for success--whether the children he saved were better able to be self-reliant.