1On a stormy day in December, 1859 a sparse and shivering group assembled at the corner of Lexington Avenue and Fifty-first Street in New York to witness the cornerstone-laying of the city’s first foundling asylum, to be called the Infant’s Home. [1] This event was the result of more than two years of investigation and planning on the part of two three-man committees of city officials. One of these was made of members of the Board of Governors of the city’s almshouse and headed by Isaac Townsend, a businessman who had served as a member of the board since 1849 (Townsend et al., 1858). [2] The other consisted of three members of the Board of Councilmen, which together with the Board of Aldermen made up New York City’s legislature (Galpin et al., 1858).

2Even though the Infant’s Home was paid for by the city and was to be built on city land, it was not to be a city-run institution. The cornerstone was laid adjacent to the Nursery and Child’s Hospital, a Protestant, privately-run institution for poor women and children, and the councilmen delegated the administration of the new foundling asylum to the Nursery’s founder and “first directress,” religious reformer Mary Du Bois. [3] They had decided to give the administration of the Infant’s Home to Du Bois based on their approval of what they saw when they visited her institution, but also, significantly, on the report she delivered to them during the months they listened to testimony from experts and ruminated over the wisdom of building a foundling asylum. The argument Du Bois made so convincingly to the city officials was that the best possible model for the foundling asylum they were contemplating was the London Foundling Hospital (Galpin et al., 1858, 7-8). [4]

3After the group—which included Mary Du Bois, a small collection of city and state officials, and the Rev. Henry E. Montgomery, the Episcopal minister who led the religious services that day—laid some mementoes under the cornerstone, they escaped from the weather to a nearby Methodist church. In the address he delivered in the shelter of the church Montgomery described what the goals of the Infant’s Home would be. According to the New York Times reporter who took down Montgomery’s words, these goals were “precisely the same” as those of the London Foundling Hospital. Just as in London, the Infant’s Home would make the reform of fallen women central to its mission. It would admit only illegitimate babies and mothers who were “fallen women of previously good character”and it would dedicate itself to guiding these women back toward “the course of virtue.” [5]

New York’s Foundlings and the Specter of Urban Chaos

4The city officials’ interpretation of the problem of abandoned babies in terms of the moral transgressions of their mothers, which was at the heart of their interest in the London Foundling Hospital, was in part an anxious response to the social chaos they perceived rising all around them. In the 1850s, when New Yorkers first realized that foundlings constituted a social problem they needed to address, the city was in the midst of dramatic change. Immigrants were pouring into the city at a rapid rate and the population swelled accordingly: from 60,489 in 1800 it increased more than eight-fold to 515,394 by 1850 (Valentine, 1860, 432). To accommodate the hordes of newcomers, landlords packed in tenants with suffoca-ting density, and as the city moved northward up the island, hills were leveled, ponds filled in, and farms and fields were replaced by streets and tenements. Depressions following periodic financial “panics” or crashes destabilized the livelihoods of both the struggling and the comfortable. Crime was epidemic. Prostitution was rampant. Mobs reminiscent of the revolutionary crowds of Europe formed over the prices of flour and bread, over control of the police department, even over the relative merits of theater actors. The knowable old walking city tucked into Manhattan’s southern tip was disappearing into a labyrinthine, caco-phonous, filthy metropolis. For New Yorkers, some nurtured on ideas of repu-blican virtue, others under the influence of the great religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening, and still others, transplanted New Englanders with residual Puritan notions, the city was coming to look more like libertine Paris than anything that ought to belong in the United States (Anbinder, 2002; Blackmar, 1989; Burrows and Wallace, 1999; Diner, 1983; Gilfoyle, 1992; Hill, 1993; Homburger, 1994; McCoy, 1980; Spann, 1981; Stampp, 1990; Wilentz,1984).

5Reformers and public officials were frightened not only by the city’s physical decay but also by its seeming moral decline. Foundlings, regardless of their diminutive size, had outsize meaning as symbols of social chaos. In particular, they seemed to represent the moral transgressions of women. As presumed illegitimates, the very existence of foundlings symbolized female sexual downfall, particularly to the evangelicals who had dominated the city’s charities since the great religious revivals of the first decades of the nineteenth century (Ginzberg, 1990; Smith-Rosenberg, 1971), while their abandonment appeared to be an explicit rejection of maternal values. For a society increasingly engaged in the sanctification of women and children and of the home as their special dominion, the rising number of babies abandoned on the streets was acutely shocking. [6]

6Nineteenth-century New Yorkers, like their British and Continental counterparts and forbears, associated foundlings with sexual stigma because they presumed that a foundling was a baby abandoned at birth by its unmarried mother in order to hide the shame of her sexual downfall. That women who abandoned babies in nineteenth-century New York were often desperately poor and alone was also true, but the public officials, religious reformers, and physicians who were among the founders and supporters of the Infants’ Home understood foundlings primarily in terms of their presumed illegitimacy. [7] This was an understanding firmly embedded in the European literary and historical heritage to which New Yorkers were heir. Between 1809 and 1826 a play called “The Foundling of the Forest” by a prolific, once popular, now forgotten English dramatist called William Dimond was performed in New York no fewer than nine times (Dimond, 1824; Odell, 1927). English translations of Eugene Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, which features a foundling heroine, were widely read and much commented on in New York when they appeared in the early 1840s. [8] These, together with Henry Fielding’s popular novel Tom Jones, Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, and the Bible (whose most famous foundling is Moses), to give just a few of the most prominent examples, would not only have provided New Yorkers with the opportunity to absorb ideas about the aristocratic or magical origins of abandoned babies but would also have made them familiar with the concept of the foundling as a discarded illegitimate.

7When in 1838 Philip Hone, a former mayor of the city, discovered a baby in a basket abandoned on his doorstep he did not hesitate to assume that the week-old boy was the child of an unmarried mother. Disregarding the note he found pinned to the baby’s wrapping that described the boy’s mother as a “poor friendless widow,” Hone exclaimed in his diary: “Poor little innocent—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 uncharitable illegitimacy!” (Hone, 1927, 369-372).

8Thus when New York reformers and public officials opened their eyes to the problem of foundlings they did so with a ready-made set of ideas that had originated in Europe. Ultimately, however, New York’s social and political landscape shaped the experience of foundlings, their mothers, and the people who tried to help them in ways that did not entirely match the experiences of their counterparts across the Atlantic.

9American law, politics, religion, and social custom sprang from British models, so it is not surprising that a group of Americans would look to England in this situation as they traditionally had in so many others. By the eighteenth century Americans had developed the habit of looking across the Atlantic—and not only to England—to see social problems in full flower that were only beginning to bud in the United States. Abigail Adams, wife of the second president and a descendant of New England Puritans, saw what she believed was the outcome of European decadence at Paris’s foundling hospital, the Hospice des Enfants Trouvés. Adams visited the Hospice in 1785 when she was in France accompanying her husband John on a postrevolutionary diplomatic mission. Her visit set her to ruminating about the differences between France and her own newborn republic. Adams commended the French for building a haven for these “helpless, Indigent Beings brought into existence by criminality; and owned by no one,” but at the same time she felt that she could not “draw a veil over the Guilty Cause.” She could not resist comparing France, “a Country grown old in Debauchery and lewdeness” with the United States, where “Mariage is considered as holy and honourable, wherein industry and sobriety; enables parents to rear a numerous of offspring…” [9]

10By the first decades of the nineteenth century Americans who lived in the growing cities of the Northeast could no longer believe, as Abigail Adams had in 1785, that large-scale social problems were manifestations of European decadence never to be seen on American shores. When in 1816 New York completed a new almshouse it was the biggest building in the city—a statement about the substantial dimensions of pauperism and crime in New York at that time (Mohl, 1970, 85).

11Throughout the nineteenth century American urban reformers looked to Europe not only to see problems full-blown, but for solutions they could apply at home. Samuel Gridley Howe, first director of the Perkins Institute for the Blind; Charles Loring Brace, founder of the Children’s Aid Society; prison reformer Dorothea Dix, and, settlement house leader Jane Addams, are just a few of the most important examples (Addams, 1924; Brace, 1872; Gitter, 2001, 29-30; Gollaher, 1995).

12In antebellum New York the number of foundlings increased along with that of the poor and criminal. In 1796 the almshouse reported a total of only twelve destitute infants in its care, “most of whom are orphans and foundlings.” [10] In 1848 almshouse commissioner Moses G. Leonard described the number of “foundlings and otherwise abandoned infants” in the care of the almshouse as “numerous” and estimated that the almshouse was responsible for 160 to 200 “and upwards” of these yearly. [11] By the 1850s city officials, with the help of reformers like Mary Du Bois, began planning the Infant’s Home; within a decade after the close of the Civil War, no fewer than four foundling asylums opened in New York. By the end of the nineteenth century New York could claim the dubious honor of building more foundling asylums and having more foundlings than any other American city. [12]

The Nursery and Child’s Hospital, the Infant’s Home, and the London Foundling Hospital

13The Infants’ Home, although the first foundling asylum planned and the first built, was not the first to open. Just as the new building was completed the Civil War broke out, and it was claimed by the city as a military hospital, which it remained for the duration of the war, only opening in December, 1865. [13] Usurping the Infants’ Home’s place as the city’s first foundling asylum was another Protestant institution, the New York Infant Asylum, which opened in the spring of 1865. The New York Infant Asylum was initially a failure, closing only seven months after it opened. In 1869 two more foundling asylums opened: the city-run Randall’s Island Infant Hospital in the spring, and the Catholic New York Foundling Asylum the following fall. The success of the Catholic New York Foundling Asylum stimulated the Protestant New York Infant Asylum back into being. It reopened in the fall of 1871 (Miller, 2008).

14The New Yorkers who opened these institutions were aware that in Europe there were two models of foundling care, the so-called Catholic and Protestant systems. In the Catholic countries of Europe (and also in Russia) states assumed full responsibility for foundlings. The main goal of the Catholic system was to preserve the honor of married men, unmarried women, and their families by making babies born outside of marriage disappear. Protestant societies, in contrast, did not have large-scale, state-run foundling asylums, and believed that parents, not the state, ought to be responsible for their illegitimate babies, with government stepping in only as a last resort. In England foundlings were relegated to the care of local government, which pursued parents for payment (Jacobi, 1870, 24-25; Pullan, 1989, 20-21). [14]

15According to these contrasting Catholic and Protestant models of foundling care, the foundling asylum was an explicitly Catholic institution and the London Foundling Hospital appears to be an anomaly. But the London Foundling Hospital was different from its Catholic counterparts. It was privately founded and run, and it did not accept babies indiscriminately. Except for a short period between 1756 and 1760 when Parliament experimentally stepped in to support it, the London Foundling Hospital never had enough room or funds to support all the babies brought to its door. To cope with its excess applicants the Hospital instituted a system of ballots and petitions, the purpose of which was not to choose the likeliest of the babies, but to determine the moral eligibility of the mothers. Women who wanted to leave their infants at the Foundling Hospital had to demonstrate shame for what they had done, and prove that they had enough support from families or employers to get back on their feet again (Barret-Ducrocq, 1991; Gillis, 1979, 142-169; McClure, 1981, 76-78, 139-144; Outhwaite, 1999, 497-510; Weisbrod, 1985,198-203).

16It was this system, which divided the “worthy” mothers from the “unworthy” ones, that attracted Mary Du Bois and New York’s city councilmen and almshouse governors in the 1850s as they planned New York’s first foundling asylum. But Mary Du Bois, under whose institutional wing the Infant’s Home was placed, (the name “Infants’ Home” was dropped as soon as the building opened, and the new foundling asylum was fully absorbed into the Nursery) adopted the London Foundling Hospital’s spirit while, out of both necessity and choice, jettisoning many of its methods.

17One of these was the practice of outside wet nursing. While in London mothers deposited their babies and departed to start new lives, at the Nursery mothers who presented themselves could enter the institution along with their infants. The Nursery also accepted unmarried pregnant women in the lying-in asylum, or maternity ward, that it added to the Infant’s Home when it opened in 1865. Du Bois welcomed women to the Nursery for two reasons. The first was a starkly practical one: it was simply very difficult to find wet nurses in New York. Infants received by the London Foundling Hospital were placed with wet-nurses in rural villages (McClure, Coram’s Children, 87-95; 250), but the Nursery, and eventually all of New York’s foundling asylums, found that there was no comparable supply of poor women available to nurse foundlings in the countryside surrounding New York. One foundling asylum physician remarked that rural Americans were simply not poor enough to need to resort to wet-nursing as a cottage industry (Jacobi,1870, 42). Another agreed, commenting: “our small farmers have no necessity to tax their wives and families with the care of nurslings.” [15] In the rural regions of Europe and Russia, as in England, poor women, tied to the land, nursed and fostered unwanted babies for generations (Fitch, 1986; Fuchs, 1984, chapter six; Kertzer, 1993, 144-153; Ransel, 1988, 176-197; Robins, 1980). The American countryside, with its well-fed and, above all, restlessly mobile population, was not an equally good source of rural wet-nurses. While almshouse officials had used poor urban women as wet nurses and caretakers for foundlings since the eighteenth century, they stopped the practice in 1860 and returned all their foundlings to the almshouse after a scandal that resulted when one such caretaker was found to be mortally neglecting three almshouse babies (Miller, 2005, 2008). [16]

18Because of this reality the Nursery, and eventually all of New York’s foundling asylums, put the mothers they accepted to work as wet nurses, typically making them responsible for their own child and one other. Even with this solution the Nursery found it hard to retain wet nurses. Mary Du Bois complained that “women in the station they occupy are seldom found with the maternal instinct strong enough to induce them to remain and nurse their own infants, when they can obtain high wages and enjoy the luxurious life of a wet nurse in a private family” (Du Bois, 1886, 17).

19The second reason the Nursery, in contrast to the London Foundling Hospital, accepted women was that women under the Nursery’s roof were more susceptible to Mary Du Bois’s moral guidance and that of the other religiously-motivated “lady managers” who volunteered their time to save the bodies and, especially, the souls of poor women and children. Soon after the building opened the Nursery’s secretary explained how the new foundling asylum, with its lying-in ward, “enabled us to strike still deeper at the root of the evil […] our earnest hope and endeavor being to save women from the ghastly crimes of infanticide and suicide, by first bringing them succor, comfort, and hope in their hour of agony and trial, and then to commence the work of reformation.” [17]

20In order to be admitted to the Nursery women had to be of “previously good character” and penitent. Women pregnant with a second illegitimate child were not admitted. [18] As at the London Foundling Hospital, shame was important to Mary Du Bois and the lady managers of the Nursery since it was the quality, they believed, that made these women worth saving. Du Bois described some of the mothers who entered the Nursery’s foundling asylum with their babies as women from the city’s hinterlands who, accidentally pregnant, came to hide themselves in the “vortex of the city.” [19] Others, she explained, were poor, urban working women tempted by the flattery of “fast” young men. In a story that was often told by the city’s moral reformers, Du Bois described how “an idle word and a slight pleasantry at first amuses, then is expected, and the result of flattered vanity is ruin. They are turned out, disgraced, and driven by the horrors of remorse often to suicide.” (Du Bois, 1886, 23). [20]

21Isaac Townsend applied this story not only to American-born women from the countryside, but also to the city’s many poor immigrants from overseas. In the report his committee of almshouse governors produced in 1858, Townsend described the “predicament of a friendless Irish or German emigrant girl in New York, of whom we next read that she has taken poison, or if nothing be afterward known, is it unfair to suppose, that, devoid of all assistance and shelter, the yawning hell of prostitution absorbs, as a fatal necessity, thousands who go down to the pit, despairing of all reclamation and past all hope?”(Townsend et al., 1858, lxviii). For Mary Du Bois, as for Isaac Townsend, sexually compromised young women suffered not only from the stigma that might drive them out of respectable occupations and into prostitution, but also from a sense of shame so strong that it could lead to suicide and the destruction or abandonment of their children.

22In reality many poor single women in New York, finding themselves pregnant, neither abandoned their babies nor resorted to suicide or infanticide. Instead, these mothers applied to the almshouse, which was mandated by law to assist them. New York’s poor laws, which were modeled on those of England, made the city ultimately responsible for the care of destitute, illegitimate, and abandoned children. The almshouse paid wet-nurses to care for illegitimate babies; in many instances the almshouse paid mothers to nurse their babies themselves. [21] To fund the care of illegitimate children the almshouse pursued fathers who, when they could be found, were required to pay (or have their sureties pay) “bastardy bonds,” sums for the maintenance of their children. [22] But women who were willing to expose their plight to the almshouse, boldly naming the fathers of their children and asking for help without demonstrating the desperation of remorse, were not the women the Nursery wanted to help. These women, according to Mary Du Bois, did not feel sufficient shame. “The Alms House,” she declared, “can receive women who have no shame or modesty left which would prevent their seeking refuge in a public charity.” It was only those once virtuous women “whose dread of discovery is greater than their love of life” who deserved admission to the Nursery’s foundling asylum. [23]

23The Nursery’s focus on fallen women obscures the fact that neither it, nor the almshouse, nor any of New York’s foundling asylums had much luck keeping foundlings alive. Statistical information from the almshouse shows foundlings dying at a rate of seventy to eighty-five percent in the 1860s, the decade that all of the foundling asylums opened. [24] Anecdotal information tells an even grimmer story. A physician who worked for the almshouse in the 1860s later recalled how the superintendent there told him on his first visit that “it would be an act of humanity if each foundling were given a fatal dose of opium on its arrival, since all of them died” (Smith, 1896, 95; see also Faber, 1963, 797). A few years after it opened the Nursery was recording death rates among foundlings of a little over sixty-six percent (Jacobi [1872], 116). As late as 1882 Mary Du Bois described her institution only as a place where foundlings “can get better care and attention, and can die in comfort.” [25] Sister Irene Fitzgibbon, Du Bois’s counterpart at the New York Foundling Asylum, commented to a reporter at around the same time that at her well-regarded institution the death rate was, to use her word, “appalling.” An early death, she added, was the fate “hanging over all foundlings.” [26]

24The state of antebellum sanitation and medicine was such that reformers and the physicians who advised them realized there was little they could do to save the lives of unwanted infants. The hopelessness that foundling asylum administrators felt about their ability to keep foundlings alive is a point that cannot be overemphasized, since it helps to explain how it was that institutions founded ostensibly for the care of infants concentrated such a significant portion of their attention on the infants’ mothers rather than on the infants themselves. The physical welfare of foundlings, they believed, was largely out of their control. In 1859, when the Infant’s Home was planned but still not yet built and the Nursery still took in only the children of wet nurses and other poor, working women, Arabella Mott, the secretary of the Nursery and the wife of surgeon Alexander B. Mott, himself the son and partner of the prominent New York surgeon Valentine Mott, wrote that “a common idea prevails, that if infants are placed in so fine a building, with ladies to watch the nurses, and good food provided, the children would not get sick or die […]. The issues of life or death are not in our hands; we pretend to do no more than this: we keep them clean, warm, well-fed, and provide well-ventilated apartments.” But the many infants admitted to the Nursery in poor physical condition, she stated firmly, “must die.” [27]

25The Nursery’s restrictive entrance policies, combined with problems of space, money, and wet-nursing, meant that it could not take in as many foundlings as the city council must have hoped in 1858 when it authorized the construction of the Infant’s Home. In March, 1866, less than four months after the Infant’s Home opened under the auspices of the Nursery, the Nursery reported that even with the limitations imposed by its entrance policies its wards were “over-flowing” and it had to “refuse twelve applicants a day.” [28] In June of the same year the almshouse established a new Department of Infants in order to cope with the destitute and unwanted babies it continued to receive. [29] This was the case even though the two Protestant institutions, the Nursery’s Infant’s Home and the New York Infant Asylum, were both open by this time. In 1866 the new almshouse Infants’ Department accepted a total of 771 foundlings. An additional 414 babies entered the almshouse together with their destitute mothers. [30] In 1868 Mary Du Bois reported that her Nursery had taken in only 195 cases. [31]

26The crisis of the Civil War added to the burdens of both the Nursery and the almshouse. While the war eased poverty for destitute men, who were absorbed by the army, it increased hardship for the women and children left behind. [32] In 1869 the almshouse, coping with the war’s additional burden, acted again, this time opening a new public foundling hospital on Randall’s Island in the East River. [33] The new building, a grand, three-story, brick and stone edifice which the almshouse called the Infant Hospital, can be understood as a tacit admission that the foundling asylum at the Nursery and Child’s Hospital, moral goals notwithstanding, had failed to cope adequately with the city’s foundlings.

The Almshouse Governor and the Arts

27While the London Foundling Hospital’s reputation for moral reform was what made it most attractive to the planners of the Infant’s Home, one of those planners had another, perhaps more quixotic interest in the London institution. This was Isaac Townsend, the almshouse governor who served as chair of the committee appointed by the almshouse in 1857 to investigate the possibility of opening a foundling asylum in New York. He was the committee’s moving spirit, and was also most likely the author of its report. [34] Townsend, like his fellow city legislators and Mary Du Bois, believed in the moral reform principles that the London Foundling Hospital exemplified, but for him the principal fascination of the London Foundling Hospital was not its entrance policies but its famous art exhibitions and organ concerts. Townsend hoped that New York’s new foundling asylum would, like the one in London, not only be a charity for poor women and children, but also an urban cultural center. The Infants’ Home did not, in the end, include anything like the impressive cultural program at the London Foundling Hospital. But the music and art Townsend saw at the London Foundling Hospital drew out of him some deeply felt observations about the related problems of foundlings, urban social breakdown, and even national inadequacy.

28In London to investigate the London Foundling Hospital as a possible model for New York, Townsend was evidently dazzled and a little cowed by what he saw there. [35] Because one of the London Foundling Hospital’s original governors was the artist William Hogarth, in the eighteenth century the Hospital became a meeting place for artists and a venue for their work. Hogarth and the American-born painter Benjamin West were among the artists whose work decorated the Hospital’s walls.

29Another of the Hospital’s influential early patrons was the composer George Frederick Handel. He made the Hospital a gift of an organ, and performances of his Messiah and Foundling Hospital Anthem, sung by choruses of foundlings and conducted by himself during his lifetime, became a Hospital tradition (McClure, 1981; 66-72; Nicholson; 1972, 45-49). The paintings and concerts at the London Foundling Hospital became a significant draw for visitors and their donations. Townsend remarked that the London Foundling Hospital was “one of the most popular places of metropolitan resort” for London’s “mingled crowd of the thoughtful, the wealthy, or the fashionable” (Townsend et al., 1858, lviii). More than that, the cultural program made the Hospital a central urban cultural institution with importance well beyond the charity it performed toward its children.

30London’s art and music program was still in force in the 1850s when Isaac Townsend was looking at London as a model for New York. He admired the Hospital’s chapel, with its stained glass windows, its paintings, and its foundling chorus. “Stained glass sheds its rich glories upon the floor,” he wrote in the lengthy section of his report devoted to the London Foundling Hospital’s arts program, “the fascination,” he continued avidly, describing the chorus of foundlings arrayed on either side of the organ in the Hospital’s chapel, “is that slope of youthful faces descending from the ceiling to the front of the gallery […] the boys, in their dark dresses on the right, on the left the girls, all neatly attired in white, and the noble organ, Handel’s munificent gift, rising between them” (Townsend et al.,1858, lviii).

31Townsend was impressed by what he saw in London, but the Hospital’s wealth of music and art also agitated the “mere politician,” as he referred to himself (Townsend et al., 1858, lix). He admired Benjamin West’s painting, Christ Presenting a Little Child, in the Hospital’s chapel, but at the same time he was miffed to find it there. The painting, Townsend wrote, “is treated in West’s best manner. Why is not that picture in New York?” (Townsend et al., 1858, lviii). Indignantly, he wrote: “We are not destitute of artists who would gladly hang historical pictures upon the wall of a similar national institution in New York. […] We are not devoid of composers, and if due encouragement were offered, the character of their productions would rise. But the institution is yet unbuilt that might receive the memorials of their patriotism” (Townsend et al., 1858, liv). That institution, he hoped, would be New York’s new foundling asylum, the Infant’s Home.

32Townsend’s reaction was partly the product of his sensitivity toward European presumptions of American cultural inferiority, such as the one famously made by Sidney Smith in the Edinburgh Review in 1820. “Who reads an American book,” Smith inquired snidely “or goes to an American play, or looks at an American picture or statue?” In the rising republic, proud but at the same time self-consciously wet behind the ears, these criticisms hurt because they were, to a great extent, true. The United States did not provide sufficient training, patronage or venues for its own artists (Bender, 1987; Harris, 1966). The result was that American artists like Benjamin West went to Europe.

33Townsend’s commitment to enhancing the arts in the United States was evidently genuine, but it was also integrally connected to his vision for New York’s foundling asylum. Culture, he believed, could elevate society morally. Like Abigail Adams, Townsend regarded foundlings as evidence of a society in a state of moral decline. In New York, Townsend worried, civilization was in danger of breaking down. “New-York is a city of strangers accidentally thrown together,” he observed (Townsend et al, 1858, xxxviii). In a city of immigrants like New York, there was no community life of the sort that could enforce marriages and prevent illegitimate births. Infant abandonment was one result. “Not only is the idea of home one that fails to be realized, but there is the absence of the realization of all the duties and obligations to society which the establishment and maintenance of a home requires, imposes, and secures” (Townsend, et al., 1858, xxxviii). A foundling asylum filled with art, therefore, would fulfill two functions: it would save unwanted babies from the street, and by providing New York’s citizens with an “alliance with the loftiest manifestations of PAINTING, SCULPTURE, and MUSIC,” it would help to prevent a “second barbarism” (Townsend et al., 1858, lv).

34Townsend died in 1860, before the Infant’s Home opened. [36] While all three of the city’s privately-run foundling asylums used concerts and art exhibits to raise funds, none developed into the kind of cultural institution Townsend had hoped for. [37] The intensity of his unfulfilled vision, however, helps to demonstrate the power of European examples for New Yorkers anxious about the direction in which their city was going.

The Sisters of Charity, the New York Foundling Hospital, and the Catholic Model

35Another group of New Yorkers who looked to Europe for guidance was the Sisters of Charity, an order of Catholic nuns dedicated to teaching and nursing (Fitzgerald, 1991, 2006; Walsh, 1960). For them it was not the London Foundling Hospital, but the foundling asylums of Europe’s “Catholic System” that served as models when they established their New York Foundling Asylum. The great wave of immigrants that entered New York’s port at midcentury added to the cultural diversity that was the city’s hallmark from the beginning. But many of these new immigrants were Catholic, and they began to break the Protestant monopoly on the city’s charitable institutions. Among those institutions were the city’s foundling asylums.

36The opening of the Randall’s Island Infant Hospital in April of 1869 to do the job that the Nursery’s Infants’ Home was built to do was a sign that the city realized the Infant’s Home’s limitations. The opening of the Sisters of Charity’s New York Foundling Asylum in October of the same year demonstrated that the city’s Catholic community had come to a similar conclusion. The New York Foundling Asylum was organized by the Sisters of Charity at the instigation of John McCloskey, Archbishop of New York. [38] The Archbishop and the Sisters realized that a need had arisen for an institution that would sympathetically serve their own constituency–the city’s Catholic, mainly Irish, immigrants. For them, the Protestant Nursery was not a refuge, but a threat.

37The New York Foundling Asylum was part of a great wave of Catholic institution-building that began in the 1840s as floods of Irish immigrants poured into the city from famine-starved Ireland. Catholic churches, schools, colleges, reform schools, and institutions for women both fallen and virtuous were part of this wave. In New York institutions such as these were on the front line of interreligious struggle (Burrows and Wallace, 1999, 750-752; Dolan, 1975; Ravitch, 1974). Foundlings had a unique place in this struggle. The solitary and unmarked state in which many foundlings were discovered left them devoid of religious identity. It was this very lack of identity that made them particularly valuable prizes in the struggle for bodies and souls in which New York’s charities, including its foundling asylums, took fervent part.

38New York’s Catholic leadership sought to rectify a situation in which their poor, young, and vulnerable were cared for by Protestant charities where active proselytizing was typically an important part of the program. The Protestant Nursery was no exception. In 1856 a letter appeared in the Catholic Freeman’s Journal describing the Nursery as a “Proselytizing Nursery Trap” with the “hidden object” of getting hold of Catholic children and making them attend Protestant Sunday schools where “their holy faith will be calumniated.” [39]

39Rhetoric aside, there was truth to this accusation. Mary Du Bois was explicitly interested in capturing souls for her own faith. [40] She was also closely associated with Erastus Brooks, one of the politicians who had attended the cornerstone-laying of the Infant’s Home with her in 1859. Brooks was elected to the New York State Senate as a member of the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic “Know Nothing”or American Party in 1853. In 1856 he was the Know Nothing’s (unsuccessful) candidate for governor. In the state senate Brooks clashed with Archbishop John Hughes over the Church Property Act, a bill that sought to take away the property tax exemption from New York’s Catholic church. A member of the Nursery’s advisory board, Brooks served as the Nursery’s friend in state government. Brooks was also editor of the New York Express, a paper which took explicitly anti-Catholic positions. A copy of the Express, along with a copy of the New York Times, which, particularly in the context of its anti-Tammany Hall crusade, voiced opinions antagonistic to the city’s Irish Catholic immigrants, was buried under the Nursery’s cornerstone on that chilly December day. [41]

40The competition between New York’s Catholic and Protestant foundling asylums demonstrates just how different the so-called Catholic and Protestant models of foundling care looked when translated to the United States. In the antebellum United States most private charities were Protestant and evangelical (Ryan,1981). The federal government as yet played no role in social welfare (with the exception of military pensions), church and state were constitutionally separated, and assistance provided by local and state government was dispensed, on the Protestant model, only as a last resort to the most destitute and helpless. [42] In the United States, furthermore, Catholics were a beleaguered minority, without the backing of church and state available to them in the Catholic countries of Europe.

41Despite all this, the structure of politics in New York helped New York’s Catholic charities. The New York Foundling Asylum, like many other religious charities in the city, including the other foundling asylums, received city and state funding. This was a practice that they both benefitted from and were made vulnerable by. Overwhelmed by the great number of poor immigrants in the city, New York city and state had begun the practice of funneling public money to private, religious charities early in the nineteenth century when poor immigrants began to proliferate. [43] Tammany Hall, the Democratic political club that, along with its leader, William “Boss” Tweed, came to define the term “machine politics,” gained immigrant votes as a result of its support of charitable institutions that served the immigrant poor. Tammany Hall was at the height of its power just at the time that the foundling asylums opened. The Sisters of Charity’s New York Foundling Asylum was a particularly important beneficiary—the wives of several Tweed Ring figures, including Mary Connolly, wife of Richard Connolly, the city’s comptroller and a prominent member of the Tweed Ring, were leaders in its “Ladies Society.” When the Tweed Ring was exposed and Connolly was arrested in 1871, he and his wife took their stolen money—money that Mary Connolly had used to benefit the New York Foundling Asylum and other charities—and fled the country (Burrows and Wallace, 1999, 1008-1012; Homburger, 1994, 206-209). Tweed Ring support was at first a great help to the New York Foundling Asylum. But scandals such as this one challenged public support for private religious charities, making public funding for the foundling asylums precarious throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. [44]

42Despite these travails the Catholic New York Foundling Asylum admitted more foundlings than any of the city’s other three foundling asylums. Closely following the example of foundling asylums in European Catholic countries, which inserted turntables into their outer walls for the anonymous deposit of foundlings (Boswell, 1988, 433), the New York Foundling Asylum left a cradle outside its front door. Mary Du Bois referred disdainfully to this practice, remarking that the Protestant Nursery operated “(with wise discrimination) only on the English plan condemning ‘the basket at the door’.” [45] During the New York Foundling Asylum’s first month it took in unwanted infants at the rate of one or two per day; during its first full year, 1870-1871, it accepted 1,377 babies, or almost 115 per month. [46] Over the years thousands of babies were laid in the New York Foundling Asylum’s wicker cradle.

43The Catholic New York Foundling Asylum’s success was one of the factors that propelled the Protestant New York Infant Asylum, which had closed in the winter of 1866 but still held a state charter, to reopen in November, 1871. The trustees and supporters of the New York Infant Asylum acknowledged the “excellent” work of “the good sisters of the Roman Catholic Foundling Asylum,” but asserted firmly that “notwithstanding the recent increase in the provision for abandoned children in New York,” a foundling asylum was still required for the “Protestant portion of the community.” Without another Protestant foundling asylum, they worried, Protestant mothers would bring their unwanted infants to the “Asylum of the Roman Catholic Sisters.” [47] They were right to be concerned, since the Sisters of Charity’s foundling asylum, though founded to serve the Catholic community, accepted babies of all faiths. [48] By the first half of the 1880s, when all four of the foundling asylums were operating and roughly comparable figures are available, the Sisters of Charity’s New York Foundling Asylum reported accepting an annual average of 969 babies each year. The public Randall’s Island Infant Hospital came next with 432, the Nursery followed with 395, and the revived New York Infant Asylum came last with 246. Of this total of approximately 2,041 babies the New York Foundling Asylum took in nearly half. [49]

Conclusion

44Even as they planned the city’s first foundling asylum, the Infant’s Home, Isaac Townsend, Mary Du Bois, and the other reformers, physicians, and public officials involved in the planning knew they would be unable to save many infant lives. Because they understood the foundling as a symbol for urban and even national decline as manifested through the sexual mis-behavior of women, they saw their new institution as a means to attack these problems. The London Foundling Hospital, with its focus on reforming fallen women, provided them with an ideal model.

45But London’s example could not be duplicated exactly in New York. In London, as in New York, foundlings served as symbols of female transgression. But in New York they also functioned as pawns in the conflict between immigrant Catholics and native-born Protestants, and as symbols of social breakdown in a society that appeared to be racing too rapidly from agrarian immaturity to urban decadence (McCoy, 1980). No matter how small and vulnerable foundlings were themselves, for one group of reformers they had come to symbolize a set of worries and insecurities that were expanding to ever greater proportions.