ORPHANS AND ORPHANAGES

Since the seventeenth century, child welfare policy in America has wavered between two principal policies: providing support to keep families together, and removing orphans from their families to care for them elsewhere. The word orphans, in the language of the new American nation, meant children who had lost one or both parents and who, because their families were unable to care for them, had become the public's responsibility. Although public leaders during the colonial period had relied primarily on three types of arrangements to care for orphans—outdoor relief, indenture, and almshouses—it was during the era of the new American nation that orphanages first appeared and entered their formative stage.

In 1739 George Whitefield (1714–1770), the charismatic leader of the transatlantic religious revival known as the Great Awakening (late 1730s and early 1740s), traveled to America to care for orphaned children. Inspired by the asylum of the German Pietist August Hermann Francke in Halle, Germany, Whitefield founded Bethesda Orphanage, known as the House of Mercy, in 1740. Located near Savannah, Georgia, it was the first orphanage in the British American colonies. (The first orphanage in all of the territory that would eventually become the United States was the Ursuline convent founded in New Orleans in 1727 by the French for children orphaned in an Indian raid.) Bethesda Orphanage was unique for its time, a product of Whitefield's emphasis on Christian charity and private philanthropy and of his insistence that benevolent giving was not the unique province of the elite. Of the forty-six children who entered Bethesda in 1740, eleven stayed for less than a year, and only nine remained in 1745. The vast majority of Bethesda's orphans returned to their families or were apprenticed to artisan families.

By 1801 seven orphan asylums dotted the Atlantic Coast. In 1790 the only publicly funded orphanage in the United States during the eighteenth century was founded by the city of Charleston, South Carolina, when it opened the doors of the Charleston Orphan House for 115 destitute children. Thereafter, private associations began to appear in northern urban areas. In 1797 one association founded the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows and Small Children in New York City to care for orphans; the following year a Roman Catholic priest established St. Joseph's Female Orphan Asylum in Philadelphia to care for girls orphaned by yellow fever. In 1799 St. Paul's Orphanage was founded in Baltimore for impoverished girls and, a year later, an association of women incorporated the Boston Female Orphan Asylum. In 1801 the Hebrew Orphan Asylum was established to care for poor children in Charleston.

Orphanages began to proliferate in America after 1801. By 1830 there were more than thirty orphan asylums in the United States, most located in northeastern urban areas, twenty-one under the auspices of Protestant churches, and ten established by Catholic churches. Elite and middle-class white women provided the leadership and organizational skills for these early orphanages. The Second Great Awakening (1790s–1830s) spurred them to social activism in this area and in many other public spheres of moral reform. These included interdenominational campaigns to curb drinking, end slavery, and improve the condition of the poor and insane.

The programs of the thirty-odd private orphanages differed radically in their approaches. Some, like the New York Orphan Asylum, sought the permanent removal of children from their indigent or widowed parents, while others, like the Boston Female Asylum, offered short-term facilities as well as long-term care for impoverished mothers during economic downturns. They often admitted as many as from ninety to one hundred children, boys under the age of six and girls under the age eight. All made efforts to educate their young charges. They were instructed in religion, reading, writing, and arithmetic, yet also earned their own keep by knitting stockings sold to benefit the institution. Most boys and girls left the asylum at approximately age twelve (though some left as early as ages nine or ten), when they were placed under indenture. Most of the girls were bound out as domestic servants; the boys were bound out as agricultural laborers to farmers or apprenticed to trades such as cabinetmaking, shoemaking, and tailoring. The managers of the Boston Female Asylum placed approximately 4 percent of their charges for adoption.

For orphanages in America, the period from roughly 1754 to 1829 was a formative one. During the antebellum era, public officials and moral reformers investigated almshouses, a popular method of caring for children. They revealed mismanaged and overcrowded institutions where living conditions were squalid. As a result, they urged that "scientifically" administered orphanages replace almshouses. In the following decades, orphanages would mushroom, numbering nearly two hundred on the eve of the Civil War.

See alsoAsylums; Philanthropy and Giving; Revivals and Revivalism; Women: Women's Voluntary Associations .

bibliography

Porter, Susan L. "A Good Home: Indenture and Adoption in Nineteenth-Century Orphanages." In Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives. Edited by E. Wayne Carp. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2002.

Hacsi, Timothy A. Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997.

McCarthy, Kathleen D. American Creed: Philanthropy and the Rise of Civil Society, 1700–1865. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

E. Wayne Carp