Abandoned

Foundlings in Nineteenth-Century New York City

Julie Miller

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780814795699
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Two interesting items:
The author's article in New York Archives
A letter regarding foundlings in The Riverdale Press

In the nineteenth century, foundlings—children abandoned by their desperately poor, typically unmarried mothers, usually shortly after birth—were commonplace in European society. There were asylums in every major city to house abandoned babies, and writers made them the heroes of their fiction, most notably Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist. In American cities before the Civil War the situation was different, with foundlings relegated to the poorhouse instead of institutions designed specifically for their care. By the eve of the Civil War, New York City in particular had an epidemic of foundlings on its hands due to the rapid and often interlinked phenomena of urban development, population growth, immigration, and mass poverty. Only then did the city's leaders begin to worry about the welfare and future of its abandoned children.

In Abandoned, Julie Miller offers a fascinating, frustrating, and often heartbreaking history of a once devastating, now forgotten social problem that wracked America's biggest metropolis, New York City. Filled with anecdotes and personal stories, Miller traces the shift in attitudes toward foundlings from ignorance, apathy, and sometimes pity for the children and their mothers to that of recognition of the problem as a sign of urban moral decline and in need of systematic intervention. Assistance came from public officials and religious reformers who constructed four institutions: the Nursery and Child's Hospital's foundling asylum, the New York Infant Asylum, the New York Foundling Asylum, and the public Infant Hospital, located on Randall's Island in the East River.

Ultimately, the foundling asylums were unable to significantly improve children's lives, and by the early twentieth century, three out of the four foundling asylums had closed, as adoption took the place of abandonment and foster care took the place of institutions. Today the word foundling has been largely forgotten. Fortunately, Abandoned rescues its history from obscurity.

1

“Children of Accident and Mystery”

Foundlings in History and Literature

On a December evening in 1838, a group of well-to-do New Yorkers sat down to dinner at the home of Philip Hone, a former mayor of the city. As the group tucked into their game and oysters, they were interrupted by an unexpected ring of the doorbell. When Hone’s servant answered the bell, he found no one there—until he looked down at the doorsill and saw a baby boy, about a week old, packed in a basket. The servant carried the baby in his basket into the dining room for Hone and his guests to see. Hone was captivated by the baby, whose appearance he meticulously recorded in his diary: “It had on a clean worked muslin frock, lace cap, its underclothes new and perfectly clean, a locket on the neck which opened with a spring and contained a lock of dark hair; the whole covered nicely with a piece of new flannel, and a label pinned on the breast on which was written, in a female hand, Alfred G. Douglas. It was one of the sweetest babies I ever saw.”

Hone and his guests abandoned their dinner and launched into a discussion of what to do. Hone was tempted to keep his charming guest, but his guests advised against it, warning that if he took the foundling in, he “would have twenty more such outlets to my benevolence.” Furthermore, Hone reflected later that evening in his diary, “if the little urchin should turn out bad, he would prove a troublesome inmate; and if intelligent and good, by the time he became an object of my affection the rightful owners might come and take him away.”

The anonymous author of the note pinned to Alfred’s wrapping identified herself as the mother of the baby and a “poor friendless widow.” Hone, knowing nothing more of his mother’s marital or sexual history, presumed that, like most foundlings, Alfred was illegitimate. “Poor little innocent,” Hone sympathized, “—abandoned by its natural protector, and thrown at its entrance into life upon the sympathy of a selfish world, to be exposed, if it should live, to the sneers and taunts of un-charitable illegitimacy!” In the end, Hone took his guests’ advice and decided not to keep the foundling. He repacked Alfred in his basket and sent him to the almshouse with a servant.¹

When confronted with a foundling, Hone and his guests knew just what to think, to fear, and to do. Their familiarity was partly the result of experience. Infant abandonment, while not yet present on the scale familiar to those in European cities such as London and Paris, was relatively commonplace in early nineteenth-century New York City. In the year when Alfred Godfrey Douglas landed on Philip Hone’s doorstep, the almshouse collected a total of eighty foundlings. Three of these, including Alfred, were retrieved on Hone’s street alone.² But New Yorkers of this period did not need to encounter foundlings directly in order to decide what they signified. As descendants of European immigrants and inhabitants of a port city where they were the recipients of a continuous flow of transatlantic information, New Yorkers such as Hone and his guests belonged to a culture in which infant abandonment was entrenched. They believed it was tragic, even deviant, but they also understood it as an ineradicable part of life. To them, the presence of foundlings seemed at once terrible—and normal.³

“Helpless Indigent Beings”: European Foundlings and Their New York Counterparts

New York’s experience with foundlings can be understood as a New World manifestation of a problem long familiar in the Old World. Infant abandonment was widely practiced in the ancient Mediterranean, for instance. In Rome, fathers were legally entitled to abandon (and also to sell or kill) any babies born in their households whom they did not choose to keep.⁴ Institutions devoted exclusively to the care of foundlings appeared first in Italy, with possibly the very first appearing in Milan in 787. Foundling asylums spread through Italy, and then through the rest of Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.⁵ By the eighteenth century, infant abandonment had become a mass phenomenon in European cities; as many as one out of every three or four children was abandoned in French, Italian, and Spanish cities at that time.⁶ In 1785, Abigail Adams, while accompanying her husband on a diplomatic mission to France, visited Paris’s foundling hospital, the Hôpital des Enfants Trouvés. She was appalled to learn that it took in six thousand foundlings per year. Britain, too, was hit with a blight of infant abandonment in the eighteenth century. In London, retired shipwright Thomas Coram saw “young Children exposed, sometimes alive, sometimes dead, and sometimes dying” as he walked through the city in the early mornings. Coram, a charitable and childless man, was so shocked by the sight that he organized the London Foundling Hospital, which opened in 1741.⁷ In 1756, when the London Foundling Hospital initiated an experimental policy of open admissions, it was at first inundated with a flood of more than one hundred foundlings per week, and it accepted a total of fifteen thousand over the four years the policy was in effect.⁸

Abigail Adams believed that foundlings, “helpless Indigent Beings brought into existence by criminality; and owned by no one,” were to be particularly expected in France, “a Country grown old in Debauchery and lewdeness.” She predicted that in the United States, newborn and flush with republican virtue, “wherein Mariage is considerd as holy and honourable, wherein industry and sobriety; enables parents to rear a numerous offspring,” foundlings would never proliferate as they did in Paris.⁹

In the 1780s, foundlings were very few in American cities, but they were not unknown, as the following story from a brief notice in the New-York Packet demonstrates. Early on a spring morning in 1788, a market woman, accompanied by her dog, was traveling through the fields and farms of Manhattan’s northern hinterland on her way to sell her produce in the city. When the dog disappeared into a field by the side of the Bowery, the same street that angles through the crowded metropolis today, she left her cart in the road and went to see what had attracted its attention. Beneath the dog’s excited muzzle she found “a living infant lying on the ground, apparently but a few hours old, with a bundle of clothes, and a purse containing 50 guineas.”¹⁰ The Packet recorded the market woman’s reaction to her discovery as “astonishment” and to her experience as “an uncommon adventure.” In 1796, New York’s almshouse officials counted twelve infants in their care. Most of the twelve, they noted, were “orphans and foundlings,” maintained together because the infants’ numbers were still too few to require the specialized institutions that the city would later build.¹¹

In contrast, by the nineteenth century, nearly all major European cities had foundling asylums, and thousands of infants were abandoned to them every year.¹² It is difficult to know exactly why there were so many foundlings in European cities, particularly since infant abandonment was typically carried out in secret by poor people whose motivations went unrecorded. But several factors make it possible to speculate. One is the rise in illegitimate births that occurred all across Europe beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing into the nineteenth. In mid-nineteenth century Paris, where the rate of infant abandonment was particularly high, approximately one third of all births were illegitimate.¹³

Although not all illegitimate babies were abandoned, most foundlings in most times and places have been illegitimate, and generally they were assumed to be so. For hundreds of years, Europeans defined foundlings as infants who had been conceived outside of marriage, delivered in secret, and abandoned by their mothers in order to conceal the evidence of sexual downfall. When the shepherd in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale finds the foundling Perdita in a chilly desert, he speculates lewdly: “this has been some stair-work, some trunk-work, some behind-door work: they were warmer that got this than the poor thing is here.” When the housekeeper in Henry Fielding’s popular 1749 novel Tom Jones finds the infant Tom abandoned in her employer’s bed, she exclaims: “it goes against me to touch these misbegotten wretches, whom I don’t look upon as my fellow-creatures. Faugh! how it stinks! It doth not smell like a Christian… . it is, perhaps, better for such creatures to die in a state of innocence, than to grow up and imitate their mothers; for nothing better can be expected of them.”¹⁴

The association of foundlings with illegitimacy, along with the stigma that was traditionally attached to unmarried mothers and their accidental children, traveled across the Atlantic to New York. It is behind Philip Hone’s reflexive assumption that baby Alfred’s mother’s claim to widowhood was untrue and that her child was illegitimate.

The rise in illegitimate births and the consequent rise in the number of foundlings was the product of a collection of social, demographic, and economic factors.¹⁵ The nineteenth century was a time of massive migration of unattached young people to cities. Many of these people experienced poverty in the rapidly growing yet fragile wage-based economies they encountered. Young women on their own had few occupations open to them other than the poorly paid ones of domestic service, the needle trades, and factory work; thus they were particularly vulnerable to poverty and single motherhood—the two factors that contributed most to infant abandonment.¹⁶

The occupation that absorbed the greatest number of working women in nineteenth-century New York was domestic service. And in New York, as in London, observers noted that the mothers of many foundlings were domestic servants. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, domestic servants were typically young, unmarried, American-born women. By the 1840s, these servants were replaced largely by Irish immigrant women. Domestic servants typically lived in the households of their employers, and since Irish immigrant women were typically young, single, and on their own, the room and board the job provided were welcome. But domestic service was hard work. Nineteenth-century servants had to haul water, keep fires going, boil vats of laundry, dispose of the contents of chamber pots, cook, clean, and tend children. Sequestered in middle-class households, with very little time or space to themselves, they were vulnerable to sexual involvements, wanted and unwanted, with their employers or fellow servants. Unmarried servants who became pregnant were rarely allowed to keep their children with them. Without family members and church and community leaders to drag laggard or unwilling lovers to the altar, these women sometimes found themselves in desperate circumstances that led them to abandon their babies.¹⁷

Just as growing cities were magnets for the migrating poor, urbanization itself was closely linked to infant abandonment. This was particularly true in America. In Europe, rural women could take advantage of urban foundling asylums, whose tentacular systems of porters, midwives, doctors, and priests stretched into the countryside, allowing them to send their babies off to the city.¹⁸ The absence of a central government meant that these were not available in colonial America. In the nineteenth century, the federal government played little role in social welfare, making extensive systems like these unavailable in America.

Although America experienced the same late-eighteenth-century rise in illegitimate births as Europe did, the result was not massive infant abandonment but marriages enforced by parents and communities, as well as some infanticide. In the small communities of early America, it was evidently too difficult to leave a baby on a doorstep and get away unseen. Infanticide was practiced more often than abandonment in small American communities, since the murder and secret burial of an infant thoroughly, and tragically, eliminated all traces of the mother’s sexual wrongdoing.¹⁹ Only when large cities developed in the United States did infant abandonment become common. During the first half of the nineteenth century, New York’s population grew explosively, creating unprecedented possibilities for personal privacy. In the “city of strangers” that New York became, it was possible for unmarried women to form secret sexual relationships, as well as for women from the countryside to come to the city to hide their accidental pregnancies.²⁰ This same urban anonymity provided the cover under which an unmarried woman was able to deposit an infant on a stranger’s doorstep.

Urban anonymity, however, could not hide all sins, particularly given the intimacy of some New York neighborhoods. The residents of these neighborhoods, particularly before the period of mass immigration from Ireland and Germany that began in the 1840s, were sometimes just as observant as their village counterparts. As a result, some women were not only observed abandoning babies, but also were known to their observers and reported by name to the authorities. This urban intimacy is evidenced by the case of a baby boy found “on the foot walk in Division Street” by a woman named Mrs. Ashdone in May 1809. The baby was delivered to the almshouse, which learned, possibly from Mrs. Ashdone herself, that he was the illegitimate son of a man named William Lambert and a widow named Eliza Ledworth, who worked as a domestic servant for a distillery. Throwing the last scrap of secrecy to the wind, the almshouse clerk recorded the baby’s name as William Lambert, after the father who would presumably have preferred to remain anonymous.²¹

It is possible that the very presence of foundling asylums in European cities also helped to contribute to the epidemic of foundlings there, because they systematized the practice of infant abandonment. In locations where foundling asylums were the least restrictive, neither quizzing mothers about their sexual histories nor dunning fathers for upkeep, many babies were abandoned. Nineteenth-century Milan is perhaps the most extreme example of this. The Pia Casa degli Espositi, Milan’s foundling asylum, had a wheel, or turntable, in the niche of the exterior wall of the building. This turntable allowed abandoners to rotate babies to the inside without being seen themselves.²² Milan’s Pia Casa was one of many foundling asylums throughout Catholic Europe to use a wheel. But the Pia Casa, unlike other foundling asylums, allowed parents to reclaim their children later on, without asking parents to pay for the cost of their children’s care. The result was that the institution accepted a staggering number of Milanese babies: virtually all illegitimate ones and some legitimate ones, too. In the 1840s, for instance, 30 to 40 percent of all babies born in Milan entered the Pia Casa, even though the rate of illegitimacy in the city was only around 16 percent.²³

In eighteenth-century Paris, entry to the Hôpital des Enfants Trouvés was also automatic and anonymous.²⁴ Jean-Jacques Rousseau gives something of the flavor of this culture of abandonment in his Confessions. Rousseau abandoned all five of his children to the Paris foundling home, the Hôpital des Enfants Trouvés. His Confessions reveal just how easy and normal infant abandonment seemed to Rousseau and members of his Parisian social circle. When The...