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THE CHARLESTON ORPHAN HOUSE
Children's Lives in the First Public Orphanage in America
By JOHN E. MURRAY
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2013 University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-92409-0
Chapter One
Introduction
On June 11, 1835, Caroline Hendricks sat down to write a letter. Two years before when her husband Frederick was still alive, business at their grocery in the Charleston Neck, the northern part of the peninsula on which Charleston sits, had slowed to a halt. Desperate to feed their children, she had hoped to send three of them to the Charleston Orphan House. Covering nearly an entire city block, the Orphan House faced Boundary Street, which ran across the peninsula between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, thus separating the Neck from the city. The Orphan House did not ordinarily consider applications from Neck residents because they lived outside the city proper, and it rarely took in children whose parents were still alive, married, and living under the same roof. But in Caroline's case the institution accepted three: her stepson Richard, then aged nine; son Henry, then aged six; and daughter Louisa, whose age cannot be determined and who probably died not long afterward. Now, two years later, Caroline approached the Orphan House again, this time as a widow with few resources. She proposed to leave her youngest, five-year-old Lawrence, at the Orphan House. Caroline may have hoped for decent food and clothing for Lawrence, or perhaps she was drawn by the reputation of the Orphan House school among the poor. She must have thought that the Orphan House offered Lawrence more than she could, but no one looked forward to relinquishing a child to an institution.
One benefit for Lawrence was rejoining his brother and half brother. Lawrence, Henry, and Richard Hendricks lived in the Orphan House together for three years. Richard, the oldest, impressed the Orphan House staff with his diligence, for in 1838 they directed two prospective employers to discuss job possibilities with him. Later that year Richard left to become an apprentice apothecary, entering a trade generally reserved for boys who had excelled at the Orphan House school. In 1841 it was Henry's turn, and he left for the US Naval Apprentice School in Gosport (now Norfolk), Virginia. Meanwhile Lawrence steadily improved in his school work and earned special recognition when examined by the commissioners, or trustees, of the Orphan House. He scored well in arithmetic, and in October 1843 he addressed the crowd at the annual founding-day anniversary. A few months later, in February 1844, Lawrence's time at the Orphan House ended when he was bound apprentice to J. A. Stevenson, a shopkeeper in far-off Union District, 175 miles to the northwest.
Before Lawrence Hendricks left for the Upcountry, he, his mother, and Stevenson all signed an indenture. In this contract, Lawrence promised to spend six years learning to operate a store, and Stevenson promised to teach him the skills necessary to keep a shop. Both parties fulfilled their commitments. After a year in the small settlement of Mount Tabor (it no longer exists), Lawrence wrote his mother to assure her that all was well. He described his happiness at attending church meetings and passed along his love to her and his two brothers. Because of a three-month-long drought, the harvest of fruit, including apples, peaches, cherries, and quinces, was thin, but the Upcountry was enjoying plenty of hickory nuts, chestnuts, blackberries, and persimmons. In part thanks to this healthy diet, Lawrence boasted, he had grown from 75 pounds to 125 pounds in just a year away from Charleston. As a result of his growth, he warned his mother, "you would not no me."
Stevenson, for his part, moved with Lawrence to Columbia in the autumn of 1845, when he opened his new store just in time for the drought that Lawrence described. When business proved slow he resolved to sell everything and move west. Lawrence Hendricks was not about to move away from his mother, and so Stevenson found another master for him, William J. Little. Stevenson informed the Orphan House about the transfer, writing that Little and his family were Methodists, "which would please his mother to hear that." With the change in employers, Lawrence took the opportunity to travel to Charleston by rail to see his mother. Little paid for his train ticket and told Lawrence to pass along good wishes from several other Orphan House apprentices in Columbia.
Lawrence left for Columbia before his indenture, or apprenticeship contract, could be revised, so the Orphan House promised to mail it as soon as possible. Back in Columbia, Lawrence became anxious about his status and wrote to Henry A. DeSaussure, the longest serving of all commissioners, to speed things up. Just to be sure, Lawrence apologized if he had misspoken while in town, but "it is my general way of speaking," the fifteen-year-old boy wrote. In good American fashion, he added, "I speak to everybody in like manner." A few days later, the indentures arrived, and Lawrence continued in his apprenticeship with Little.
WHY DID CHARLESTON FOUND ITS ORPHAN HOUSE, and whom did the Orphan House serve? Most directly, the Charleston Orphan House protected the poor white population of Charleston by acting as an early social safety net cum life insurance policy. The Orphan House guaranteed the white poor that their children would be cared for should the family disperse due to death, disability, or abandonment. The place of the Orphan House in the city of Charleston and the mechanics of its operations are described in the first two chapters of this book, but the experiences of the families that relied on the Orphan House, and not least the children who lived there, are the main subject of this book. Their history is a part of Charleston's peculiar mixture of civic pride and racial anxiety. The ordinance that established the Charleston Orphan House in 1790 brought the city's abandoned and distressed children under the roof of the first public orphanage in the United States. The city was proud of its accomplishment. Local dignitaries escorted presidents from Washington to Madison to Taft up to Boundary Street (Calhoun Street after 1849) to see the bounty of the white upper class in action. In assuring poor whites of elite concern for their children, the Orphan House served a political function as important as its social welfare function. It did more than merely process vulnerable children.
The Orphan House was a focal point of white Charleston. It attracted the poor who needed it to care for their children, and the artisanal and mercantile classes who wanted those children to work as apprentices, and the wealthy elite who oversaw those efforts to care for young people, and then brought them all—poor families as well as merchant and artisan employers—together. As a result, it was woven into the city's fabric more deeply than any other institution. It brought all levels of white society together. But the Orphan House corporately embraced the poor.
To convince officials of their worthiness, adults who nominated their children for Orphan House admission wrote down their history of impoverishment, or, rarely, orally presented these stories to the Board of Commissioners. Skeptical commissioners then sent a board member to investigate. This initial process generated hundreds of letters in which poor families described their situations, all the while knowing that if they exaggerated, the visiting commissioners would likely find out and reject their children's applications. The result is a broad sample of reliable testimonies from the white urban poor during the early republic and antebellum eras, a time which has yielded scarce evidence indeed on this overlooked population. Later when an artisan or merchant contacted the Orphan House to obtain those same children as laborers, the process virtually repeated itself. Tradesmen, merchants, and a few planters described the work and life they expected the child to enjoy or endure, and the commissioners investigated and read reference letters to ensure that the children of the poor would encounter trustworthy guides into adulthood. Ever conscientious about monitoring the well-being of their former charges, the commissioners circulated letters to these masters, asking after their progress. The responses yielded eyewitness reports on the ordinary lives of poor children from early childhood to early adulthood. In many cases rather than being apprenticed to a master not personally known to the youth, the child returned to a mother or father who was newly remarried and capable of resuming family life. Even here, commissioners carefully vetted the new spouse to ensure that the child was reentering a proper family situation.
The sum total of all these inquiries and responses may be the single greatest collection of first-person reports on work and family lives of the poor anywhere in the United States that covers the entire period between the Revolution and the Civil War. The records illuminate the lives of the poor without losing any of the essential Southernness of their subjects. Managing the health of children and their families' fear of febrile diseases always took "the sickly season" into account, the families of the children (usually) showed deference to the commissioners of the Orphan House, and the Orphan House itself bought, sold, and rented slaves. As in the case of Lawrence Hendricks, fragments of many lives can be reconstructed to an extent that allows an unprecedented view into the lives of ordinary people, including the very poor. Their role in Southern history can now enter the published record.
The Orphan House developed in parallel with the city of Charleston, the fortunes of which peaked early in the nineteenth century. Despite its dependence on agricultural staples such as rice and heavily subsidized indigo, before the Revolution the Low Country economy grew in terms of both wealth and breadth. Even including the black population, wealth per person exceeded that in most Northern cities. Along with that wealth came expanding networks of communication and finance. But, as this book will show, wealth and sophistication were only necessary conditions for the establishment of the Orphan House.
Once founded, the Orphan House fulfilled a fairly simple charge. For local children it provided a bare-bones education of basic literacy skills, and then arranged for older children to enter apprenticeships in the various skilled trades that were flourishing along with the city's economy in the late eighteenth century. Over the course of the rest of the antebellum period, all those descriptors would change. The Low Country lost its position as chief export center of the South as cotton cultivation moved west. The value of traded goods stagnated along with transport industries such as shipbuilding. Population grew, but slowly, so that Charleston fell from its place among the leading cities of the nation. In the 1850s white population growth came from immigration, creating another headache for city fathers. Markets for the city's products grew torpid, thin, and disarticulated. As the city's economy became more enervated, the skilled trades that had earlier employed Orphan House apprentices vanished. The Orphan House bound ever more young people to become farmers or domestics, and others were sent from the Orphan House so hurriedly that indentures reported their future trades as "unknown."
The Orphan House itself grew and changed over this time. Most obviously it moved from several buildings into the great structure on Boundary Street in 1794, which expanded in the 1850s. Internal changes followed trends in contemporary attitudes toward children. School subjects broadened to include geometry and history, and girls were examined regularly along with the boys. Corporal punishment, freely meted out in the early years, was virtually abandoned by late in the antebellum era. A few boys left the Orphan House for university study, and a few girls trained to be teachers. Perhaps most remarkably, in 1854 the all-male Board of Commissioners, which for six decades had governed the Orphan House collectively and more or less jointly with the informally organized Ladies Commissioners, ceded nearly all of day-to-day management to one woman, Agnes K. Irving, a twenty-three-year-old New Yorker. It was she who led the Orphan House through years of war and Reconstruction, and into the twentieth century.
Equally great shifts occurred among the children's families. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the great majority of Orphan House children were bound out as apprentices, while a relatively small number of them were returned to their families. By midcentury, custody of an older Orphan House child was slightly more likely to be transferred back to a family member (usually a widowed mother who had remarried) than to a master who would direct an apprenticeship. This change—possibly a change of heart in some cases—was driven as much by families as by the Orphan House. It reflected increases in income that enabled families to raise the children they had previously relinquished to the Orphan House. Even here, the material explanation cannot suffice; over the early to mid-nineteenth century, Southern white families must have changed their minds about child raising. They wanted to have these children back under their roofs, in ways they had not in the late eighteenth century.
OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE INTERIOR LIVES of families in the American past has been indirect, for the most part, and subject to few generalizations. Carl Degler inferred that the tendency of Puritan families, as demonstrated by Edmund Morgan, to send their children out to be raised in other families was a sign of parental detachment. And for later families, while acknowledging the paucity of sources on the working class, Degler endorsed the general view that the failure of eighteenth-century adults to discuss their children in letters indicated a more general lack of interest in them. To break this absence of primary sources on children, Harvey Graff used some five hundred autobiographical accounts of childhood. But to generalize from an unrepresentative prosopography is dangerous indeed, and Graff concluded that "neither a simple summary nor a casual conclusion [was] possible."
As a result, historians have tended to focus on a few examples with considerable intensity, beginning with Benjamin Franklin's spell as an apprentice printer. A later example is Lucy Larcom. Steven Mintz begins his chapter on working children with a vignette about this young woman, a rather ordinary mill worker about whom we now have a published autobiography (also examined in Graff's book); we also have an edited volume of her letters and diary, and two recent biographies. Why this unexceptional woman should be the subject of such attention is explained by her authorship of A New England Girlhood. This book led to her posthumous fame less from its art than its representation of a rare type of writing: worker memoirs. The fundamental problem behind this concentration on so few individuals is the lack of primary material written by the poor and working class. This is hardly surprising, but at the same time we should not be too quick to dismiss the possibility of other documents on and by the poor that hitherto have been overlooked.
Domestic lives of the rich are far better documented. Recent efforts by historians of the South have generated insight into the families of the planter class and their slaves. In one of the most systematic of such examinations, Bertram Wyatt-Brown considered Southern child-raising patterns in the context of honor. Mothers felt ambivalence toward their children, he proposed, but still permitted themselves to form emotional bonds with their offspring. The evidence for these assertions, though, was of questionable relevance to the question at hand, depending as it did on secondary literature on planter families plus assumptions that the poor acted pretty much the same as their betters. Sally McMillen described the experiences of mothers in Motherhood in the Old South, focusing on pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care, but again, who else but the planter class would have had the time, ability, or desire to write about such things?
Sideways views of ordinary families sometimes appear in legal settings. Peter Bardaglio described how Southern jurists failed to develop best-interests-of-the-child standards in adoption and public apprenticeship, in contrast to the North after the mid-nineteenth century. Bardaglio suggested that the Southern commitment to uphold blood ties as established in common law, specifically to defend the father's prerogatives, directed such a strategy. Suzanne Lebsock thoroughly examined most strata in one Southern community, but few poor women and their families appear in it. Again, they left behind few of the legal records on which Lebsock relied, at least until the women were widowed. Indirect views of working class women's capabilities appear in their use of public speech. Cynthia Kierner showed that in Charleston, working women took advantage of revolutionary-era discourse that emphasized equality. They then learned how effectively to petition men in politically superior positions.
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Excerpted from THE CHARLESTON ORPHAN HOUSE by JOHN E. MURRAY Copyright © 2013 by University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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