Moving right along....a month later.... (and yeah, i didn’t spell check yet. Have fun!)
The nineteenth century home was quite unlike the modern middle-class ideal of the nuclear family, and yet we could say that both then as now “the family as an institution provides the stage on which the struggle for American identity is played out” (Pazicky xiii). Understandings of the family are filtered through two media: the sentimental novel, which takes place almost entirely in the middle-class home, and the “conflation of the family with the Christian tradition,” which most recently as expressed itself in the religious Right’s defense of “family values,” but which has been with American since as far back as John Winthrop’s conceit of the Massachusetts Bay colony as a family in “A Model of Christian Charity” in 1630. However, about one-quarter of nineteenth century households in America “contained servants, relatives, and children who were not a part of the nuclear family” (O’Connor 98). Brace encounted many different forms of these extra-familial family members in his New England youth, including domestic servants and apprentices, which have as their ultimate legacy the Puritan requirement that all unattached individuals had to become attached to some particular family, and thus under the purview of some particular patriarch. Still other practices in the middle-decades of the nineteenth century, such as indentured servitude and slavery, would have been known to Brace even if they were becoming rarer and later illegal in the North.
Many of the extra-familial household members that Brace and other New Englanders would have encountered were not in the home for very long, forming a constant stream of bodies in and out of the house. Early on in her novelistic depiction of her childhood home, The Morgesons, Elizabeth Stoddard describes the many extra-familial members of the household--a cook and another female “domestic,” as well as “two men for the garden and stable” (22). But when she comes to describe how there “was always attatched to the house” a boy, “whose general duty was to carry armfuls of wood, pails of milk, or swill, and to shut doors,” she describes “not the same boy, but a Boy dynasty, for as soon as one went another came” (22). Over the course of the novel, not just the “boy” changes, as domestics and residents of the home move about with startling rapidity. After the marriage of the Morgeson’s domestic, Temperance, Stoddard describes her replacement as “a Celtic dynasty,” highlighting, again, the rapid influx and outflow of the members of their home (150). Within the context of Brace’s times, then, the desire to add members to a family, to send orphans to live in “the farmer’s home” as Brace puts it, would seem more comfortable and normal to a contemporary observer, one accustomed to these dynasties.
And yet, Brace is attempting to reform the institution of domestic labor by holding up as an ideal the adoption of these children into the family proper--to turn the “boy dynasty” into a son. Brace is not alone in having some discomfort with the disconnectedness of domestic labor. Emerson attests to his unease with this fact of nineteenth century household life when, in his letter to George Ripley refusing Ripley’s offer to come to Brook Farm, Emerson writes that he wishes to “mend [his] domestic life...[by] ameliorating or abolishing in [his] house the condition of hired menial service” (Myerson 311-2). Emerson’s objection, much maligned since, seems to rest primarily on the argument that such “service” denies to the purchaser a “manner of living” that is “honest and agreeable to his nature” (312). This is not an attack on domestic labor as such, but rather an awareness that if domestic labor sits uncomfortably with one, then one should find a way to live with out it. Emerson’s objection is that domestic labor negatively affects his own self-reliance and thus is something he wishes to live without. Later in the same letter, Emerson states that, while he does not wish to relocate to Brook Farm, he does nonetheless wish “to make the experiment of labor & self help” (312). Emerson, that is, objects to accepting “menial service” because it limits one’s own ability to be self-reliant, but Brace extends this critique, at least insofar as it applies to the children aided by the CAS. However, for both Emerson and for Brace the ideal was a household in which the line between laborer and family was not necessarily erased but much weakened. Although, for Brace, the ultimate goal was adoption, which is the erasure of the line between laborer and family.
Emerson’s discusion of for whom domestic labor is troublesome (for himself, the purchaser) seems almost too casually blind to the issues of class present in the hiring of domestic help. But it must be noted that Emerson is not objecting to the presence in the home of extra-familial persons per se nor to domestic labor as such or even as part of the market economy, but rather to the formal divide between those who do a labor or provide a service and those who receive that labor or service. He is objecting, that is, to how lines of class divide apart his household. Specifically, in the 1840s Emerson was concerned about his two domestic servants, Louisa and Lydia, whom he invited, in an act meant to weaken those lines between laborer and purchaser, in 1841 to sit at the family table for meals. Lydia, “the cook, firmly refused,” Emerson reported to his brother William (Myerson 313). Louisa originally “accepted the plan with great kindness and readiness,” and joined the Emersons at table. This gesture to move Louisa and Lydia more intimately into the family’s activities ended after but one meal, after which Louisa refused to let Lydia eat alone. In 1841, then, Emerson was already rethinking his household arrangements and trying, as he told Ripley, to find a way to live in a self-reliant manner--in a “manner of living [both] honest and agreeable to [his] imagination,” and in a manner that did at least somewhat acknowledge the class situation within the home (312). Tellingly, Emerson seems comfortable with hired help that is congruent with a sense of self-reliance on both sides. He seems, that is, not to be worried about his other domestic laborer. In 1841, Henry David Thoreau also lived with the Emersons as the children’s tutor and the household handyman, helping while Emerson was at home but also helping to keep the house running during Emerson’s frequent trips to lecture. Emerson’s comfort with Thoreau’s assistance seems to indicate that the principle at stake in his letter to Ripley was not domestic labor per se, but how domestic help is inter-related with individual self-reliance on both the part of the laborer and the purchaser.
Brace’s own family life does not show such an unease with domestic help, in part because the Braces, not quite as affluent as the Emersons, did not have much help, and in part because for most of Charles’ life, their home served both the family and the school. The Braces shared meals with the students from the Female Seminary and saw them come in to the family space and move out during the semesters and over the years. As noted earlier, the Brace’s even shared a house with the Beecher’s before the move to the Female Seminary, and Brace himself moved between his own residence and Frederick Law Olmstead’s farm on State Island. More significantly for Brace’s later comfort with the extended family setting of the Rauhe Haus and even later with his faith in the potential integration of orphans into other familes is the fact that Brace lived in a world still full of other socially sanctioned relationships between individuals in but not of the family. Relationships such as slavery, indenture, and apprenticeship would have been either present to Brace or still powerfully in the surrounding culture as ways of incorporating dependent children into the home and family. Most controversially in the nineteenth century is the issue of slavery, but these other forms of extra-familial relationships like those with domestics, indentured servants, and apprentices still carried cultural force in Brace’s world. For instance, despite its waning in the years before Brace’s birth, indentured servitude would have been a very important precursor to the new relationships emerging both in the market economy of the mid-nineteenth century and from Brace and the CAS’s efforts to construct new “family” relationships with outplacement.
One distant precursor to the CAS’s scheme of placing out might be said to be the Puritan practice of “binding out,” “a Puritan form of adoption whereby children old enough to work were often placed with other Puritan families as apprentices, taught a trade, and raised like members of the family” (Pazicky 28). While the origins and extent of binding-out are unclear, what is clear is that it was a system in which familes were inter-connected through their children, thus uniting the community as such with each individual family. As mortality rates declined and as attitudes towards children changed, binding-out became replaced by standard apprenticeship and other educational systems for most children. One class of child, however, remained connected with life in a new family through much of the early American period: the immigrant child.
“Indentured servitude was the defining experience in the lives of immigrant youth” in colonial America, writes Steven Mintz. By the middle of the nineteenth century, “white” indenture was all but extinct, though it still carried a deep cultural memory (38). David Galenson claims that “isolated cases of the indentured servitude of [European] immigrants can be found as late as the 1830s” in North America, but that the “system appears to have become quantitatively insignificant in mainland North America much earlier, perhaps by the end of the eighteenth century” (13). Galenson’s claim belies the racial reality of indenture, particularly on the Pacific coast where Chinese laborers continued to come as indentured servants well into the late nineteenth century. That is, Brace did not live in a world only with a cultural memory of indenture because while indenture was all-but extinct in New England, it was thriving on the west coast, though it was restricted racially to Chinese and Japanese laborers. Still, it was a practice on the decline. Indentured servitude became illegal in all territories of the United States formally in 1917 (Galenson ##). This change helps to show just how very much in flux the relationships in and around the family were in Brace’s world. Domestics were becoming less a part of the home and more like pure wage-laborers who lived elsewhere, and indenture was removing itself further from memory as it was aligning itself, like slavery, to a logic of racial exclusion.
More common in the New England of Brace’s youth and maturity, however, was the experience of apprenticeship. “Until the early nineteenth century,” writes Steven Mintz, apprenticeship was how boys were trained in skilled trades” (137). But, as Mintz continues, apprenticeship was “more than a system of labor” (137). It was also a “foster home for youths in their teeens,” and a way for cheap labor to enter the marketplace and for youth to encounter successful adult models (137). Yet that system was changing as a result of urbanization and industrialization, and by “the mid-nineteenth century, apprenticeship resembled most other employment relationships. Instead of living in a master’s home, apprentices received cash wages and resided in boardinghouses in distinct working-class neighborhoods. The paternalistic view of a master who supervised behavior and provided for an apprentice’s welfare was replaced by a new conception of labor as a commodity that could be acquired or disposed of according to the laws of supply and demand” (Mintz 138). This is a far cry from the binding-out practice among the Puritans, where children were accepted not primarily as laborers, but as members of the family. Mintz concludes that after the panic of 1837, the apprentice system was irreparably broken in New England. Instead, new forms of employment were arrising for youths, such as the Lowell System, where the “mill girls” lived in nearby boarding houses and were strictly monitored but did not have a personal relationship to any one “family.” Likewise, lodging houses for journeyman and apprentice laborers sprung up all over the nation, providing a place to sleep and companionship for laborers who no longer found lodging with their “masters.” When Brace began his work in New York City, then, he did so at a time when the older models of how to incorporate children and child labor, including orphans and abandoned children, into families, primarily through indenture and apprenticeship, were broken or breaking down. Brace’s signal insight was, as we shall see, to call on a rhetoric of self-reliance straight out of the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson to establish, Brace hoped, a relationship between child and adult with real and lasting obligations and connections so as to replace in outcome, if not in form, the lost systems of indenture and apprenticeship.
While indenture and apprenticeship were coming to their end and the nature of domestic labor was changing to move out of the home, slavery was a constant presence and source of troubling concern during most of Brace’s working years. Brace was a committed abolitionist, and the CAS was working in New York, where slavery essentially had been illegal since 1799’s “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery.” But slavery was powerfully alive in the time and stood as a shadowy caricature of nineteenth century conceptions of family.
Weinstein argues that “slavery is central to [the] self-examination” of family enacted by sentimental fiction because it “register[s] the ways in which...tales of parentless children both intersect with and diverge from the narratives of children made parentlyess through slavery’s legalized acts of what Orlando Patterson has identified as ‘social death’” (7). We could extend Weinstein’s analysis to consider the practicies of the CAS as well as the strategies enacted in sentimental fiction. Brace and the CAS clearly are working to break down the power of consanguinuity and to remake family as a matter of choice. Likewise, slavery renders immaterial and unimportant the blood-ties between family members, as only the economic value of child and/or parent is considered. Children sold through the internal slave trade, valued only for the economic return to their masters and not for their place within their families, fly in the face of the sentimental cult of domesticity, a fact which is often highlighted in slave narratives, particularly those by women. In a similar way, critics of the CAS often portrayed them as child-thieves, stealing children from lower-class and immigrant families and sending them out to be raised by middle-class whites far from their birth families. Particularly passionate were Catholic critics, who saw in the CAS’s efforts a plan to diminish the numbers of Catholic children through forced conversions to Protestantism far from the watchful eyes of the New York parishes.
Similarly problematic is the way in which Brace focuses on the economic value of the child to the adopted family. Part of the elegance of Brace’s solution to the urban problem of dependent children is that it also meets the need for labor present in the West. Brace writes that “the United States have the enormous advantage over all other countries, in the treatment of difficult questions of pauperism and reform, that they possess a practically unlimited area of arable land. The demand for labor on this land is beyond any present supply” (225). Brace calls the plan to send children out West to fill this labor gap a “simple[,] most effective, [and]ingenious scheme,” but it seems a scheme haunted by the spectre of slavery--of valuing a human being primarily for his or her economic capacity. Brace’s efforts to physically separate family members, to move children across the country, echoes the forced movements of slaves, especially slave children, by their “owners” “where,” as Weinstein argues, “the affective value accorded to consanguineous relations has been rendered irrelevant...by virtue of the economic value assigned to children born of slave mothers” (10). Or, we could say, by the economic value assigned to children born to impoverished mothers.
And yet, we must distinguish, I think, between the two cases: that of the slave and that of the placed-out child. In part we should do so with an understanding of the rhetoric by which Brace publicized his work and his society. His public discussion of the economic value of these children to the West is an attempt to convince, on the one hand, wealthy donors to support the work of the CAS by convincing them that these children will be able to contribute to the nation, and, on the other hand, to convince the children and their families that these children will be in a safe and secure situation in the West. In the early decades of its existence the CAS depended entirely on donations, gifts, subscriptions and the earnings of some of its projects (such as the rent paid at the various lodging houses). Brace’s constant reminders, then, of the economic value of the children is in keeping with his efforts, as Secretary, to give his donors something concrete for their money. Additionally, most of the clientele of the CAS knew poverty, knew what it was like to live without a stable and secure source of employment, and such a promise would have been a great incentive to them to relocate. Far from being valued as a source of capital, like a slave, Brace is in effect telling his “little wanderers” that their labor will secure for them a stable home and place. At the same time, he is telling his donors that securing a stable home and place for these children will additionally secure the fruits of their labor for the nation as a whole, and thereby repay their investment in the CAS. It may be to put to fine a point on it, but I do think that the aim of the CAS, which was to improve these children’s situations through relocation to the West differs significantly from the aims of a master over his slave, howevermuch the two might be reminiscent of each other.
Still, the work of the CAS is haunted by slavery. The act of moving children from the city to homes in the “West” by means of the Orphan Trains problematically resembles representations of the slave auction. True, the goal for one is the “best interests of the child” instead of the master, but they both trade in common representations and, as Weinsten says, “those resonances with slavery never completely go away” (14). Brace writes that the CAS would “form[] little companies of emigrants, and, after thoroughly cleaning and clothing them, put them under a competent agent, and, first selecting a village where there was a call or opening for such a party, we dispatched them to the place” (231). This description seems haunted by images of auctions present in the Northern press at the time. The CAS would notify the “farming community” about the arrival of the children, and would then publicly display the children to the interested parties, negotiating with each prospective adoptive parent through the agent and a local board of concerned citizens (such as ministers, doctors, or other prominent individuals) until placement was agreed upon. As Marilyn Holt points out, the “auctions” were often preceded by advertisements. One such advertisement described a “Very promising, 2 years old, blonde, fine looking, healthy, American [boy],” and even came with its own “money-back guarantee” and fine print: “All Children received under the care of this Association are of SPECIAL PROMISE in intelligence and health, and are in age from one month to twelve years, and are sent FREE to those receiving them, on ninety days trial, UNLESS a special contract is otherwise made” (quoted in Holt, 116).
The guarantee at the end of this announcement is particularly emblematic of slave advertisements. A similar announcement for a slave auction in New Orleans in 1835 claimed that “all the above named Slaves are acclimated and excellent subjects; they...will be severally warranted against all vices and maladies prescribed by law” (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma02/harris/utc/images/neworleans.jpg).
The parallels--public display, advertisements, negotiated acquisitions, the cleaning and clothing of the children, the arrival in town in a group--between these emigration companies and slave auctions are present and disturbing. The discovery of a similar “haunting,” that of the sentimental novel’s orphan heroines by the presence of the orphans of slave families, led Weinstein to conclude that “contractual relations overlap[] quite ominously with the logic and language of slavery” because they replace consanquinuity with contract, family with economic value. In both the slave auction and out-placement, human beings are moved across the country, separated from their blood-relatives, and re-attached to another family through the legal fiction of the contract. That the case of out-placement by the CAS or other agencies functions, ideally, in the best interest of the child, as opposed to slavery’s devaluing of the interests of those auctioned, merely mitigates though it cannot erase the modern unease at the spectacle of children arranged in the town square for viewing and selecting by prosepctive “adopters.”
