II. Immigrant Children
Unlike working children or juvenile delinquents, immigrant children of the first half of the nineteenth century cannot be studied separately from adults. Immigrant children experienced with their parents the pain of uprooting, the vicissitudes of crossing, and the tribulations of adjustment. Public laws and regulations did not distinguish between children and adults, except in the calculation of fares and space allotted aboard ships. Immigration laws extended no special protection to children and made no allowances for their needs.
An unprecedented wave of migrations in the middle of the nineteenth century confronted Americans with new social problems. From 1790 to 1820 only about 250,000 immigrants entered the United States, while from 1815 to 1860 5,000,000 immigrants poured into a population which in 1820 numbered about 10,000,000 and in 1860, 31,000,000. This movement began with 151,000 in the 1820's and reached 2,314,000 in the 1850's. It consisted largely of displaced Scandinavian tenant farmers and of Irish and German peasants fleeing potato famines. The first Scandinavians arrived in 1825, but their immigration did not gain momentum until the 1840's. The Irish wave peaked between 1845 and 1849 after the great famine, the German between 1846 and 1855. From the 1840's on, most immigrants arrived virtually penniless. Unable to continue their journey inland, many remained in the coastal cities to swell the rolls of unskilled labor and the dependent poor. This was especially true of the Irish. [1a]
The immigrants of the 1830's and 1840's shared the aspirations and expectations of the many generations of newcomers who ventured to improve their lives and to secure a better future for their children. "When children are born they are called blessings here," wrote a man from New York to his brother in England. [1b] The theme of a new world for children was expressed in all waves of migration as well as in the westward movement within the American continent.
America became the common man's utopia in the first half of the nineteenth century. Across the Atlantic prospective immigrants eagerly read printed reports and long-awaited "America letters" from friends and relatives. [1c] John West, a shoemaker who had come to Pennsylvania from Corsley, England, advised his relatives: "A man can do better here with a family than with none. For children at six years old can work and get some money." [1d] Stephen and Elizabeth Watson, paupers in England who had emigrated at parish expense, reported from Dearborn, Indiana: "We can get our children educated better than one could at your place. The free school here is the Lancastrian system; it has four hundred scholars, both rich and poor, who pay one dollar a quarter, and some not more than a shilling sterling; the scholars are taught reading, writing, arithmetic, geography." [1e] Such glowing reports from the promised land infected relatives and neighbors with the fever of migration. En route to utopia immigrants crossed overland routes and spent several months in cramped steerage quarters of freight vessels. If they survived "floating pestilence," starvation, and abuse, they became prey to "sharpers" and thieves on their arrival.
The initiative for the protection of the immigrant came from the federal government. In 1819 Congress set a limit on the number of passengers a vessel could carry. A law passed in May 1848 required adequate ventilation of the ship, set minimum quantities of food, water, and fuel for each passenger, called for the installation of cooking ranges, and made the captain responsible for maintaining "good discipline, and such habits of cleanliness . . . as will tend to the preservation and promotion of the health." The act of 1855, which superseded all previous legislation, protected families by insisting that double-berths be occupied only by combinations of two women; a husband and wife; two men of the same family; a woman and two children under age eight; or a man and two of his own children under age eight. [1f] The laws went generally unobserved. Thus, while the laws did not improve the circumstances of the individual immigrant, they indicate the government's conception of responsibility for the protection of immigrants in transit.
The states, on the other hand, were more concerned with the protection of their own populations from immigrant paupers than with the welfare of newcomers. The first permanent state agency for the protection and relief of immigrants—and indeed the first state welfare agency in America — was the New York State Board of Commissioners of Emigration. Its goals, in the words of Friedrich Kapp, a leading member of the Board, were "to protect the newcomer, to prevent him from being robbed, to facilitate his passage through the city to the interior, to aid him with good advice, and, in cases of the most urgent necessity, to furnish him with a small amount of money; in short, not to treat him as a pauper with the ultimate view of making him an inmate of the Almshouse, but as an independent citizen, whose future career would become interwoven with the best interests of the country." [1g]
The commissioners of emigration collected head taxes and indemnity bonds imposed on immigrants and crew and vessels arriving at the various New York ports. Using these funds to aid immigrants and to reimburse local communities for relief granted to immigrants, the commissioners acted on the principle that the immigrant was entitled to relief, since he had paid for it. In 1855, to protect immigrants from boardinghouse runners and unscrupulous transportation agents, the commissioners established a central compulsory landing depot in Castle Garden at the foot of Manhattan. There they provided information on lost luggage, transportation, guidance, and job placement. Initially the commissioners restricted their health activities to immigrants suffering from contagious diseases. In 1848 they leased Ward's Island in the East River where they established a general hospital, a lying-in hospital for mothers, and a refuge for unemployable immigrants. Recognizing the need of children for special treatment, the commissioners took charge of illegitimate children, administered the property of orphans, and maintained a nursery and a school on Ward's Island.
The new waves of the great migration had a direct impact on the urbanization and industrialization of the Northeast. The expanding textile, iron, and construction industries absorbed the immigrant labor force. Irish canal builders worked their way from Boston to Lowell, while their women and children entered the textile factories. Yankees in New England factory towns complained of recent immigrants who, in their readiness to work for any wage, were displacing young women of native stock in the mills. [1h] In a report issued in 1858, a Massachusetts legislative committee, using familiar rhetoric, held immigrants and corporations responsible for the social problems of towns with a high percentage of foreigners: "Monster corporations import by the shipload the employees who fill their mills, [and] do the base drudgery of their workshops and their degrading, ill paid, menial services in every branch of business. They allow them to erect in their cities and towns the most miserable shanties for dwellings, or else, the capitalists, who profit by their labor, do it in their stead. In these are made the paupers of the state." [1i]
Not even the unskilled labor market could absorb the immigrant flood that poured in during the 1840's and early 1850's. Boston, New York, Baltimore, and New Orleans complained of the burden of charity and poor relief. Young immigrant rag-and-bone and coal pickers, petty thieves, beggars, and street arabs became part of the scene in the Five Points district of New York, in Boston's North End, and in the newly christened "Irish Channel" section of New Orleans. Theodore Lyman, mayor of Boston from 1831 to 1835 and, in 1847, a principal figure in the establishment of the first state institution for delinquents, warned in 1835 "we shall have among us a race that will never be infused into our own . . . Their children will be brought up in ignorance and idleness; disregarding themselves every comfort and neglecting every decency of life." [1j]
The immigrant child did not import delinquency and dependency to America. Yet,
the staggering influx of immigrant poor aggravated existing conditions of destitution. By mid-century immigrant children and children of foreign-born parents composed about 50 per cent of the inmates in reformatories and houses of refuge. [1k] Hence, benevolent societies, holding the immigrant responsible for the impersonal forces which seemed to threaten the existing order, were startled by what they considered a "vast influx of foreign pauperism, ready-made and hatched abroad, ignorant, squalid and degraded, alien to our institutions, usages, habits and laws." [1l]
In their concern for the protection of society from the potential criminal in a neglected immigrant child, philanthropic organizations found the obvious answer in Americanization. Protestant missionary organizations which undertook the rescue of immigrant children in the mid-nineteenth century conceived of Americanization as a method of social control and a proselytizing effort, rather than a cultural movement. Many made the welfare of the immigrant secondary to their desire to rescue souls from Catholicism. "Boston is a dreadful place for making Protestants of people, and you must be careful, especially of the children, or they will get them from you," an Irish priest in Halifax warned a mother about to move to Boston. [1m]
In their uplifting work Americanizers discovered that education and labor — the traditional weapons in the war on pauperism—were insufficient in dealing with the immigrant. An entire transformation of character was necessary. The Massachusetts State Board of Charities insisted that if immigrant children were trained in proper homes and mingled freely with native children, their "habits and character must be radically changed; they will be no more foreigners but Americans — the alien will become naturalized." [1n]
Because of the enormity of the task of coping with entire families and because of the lack of cooperation from parents, missionaries had to concentrate on the children alone. Boston's Benevolent Fraternity of Churches, despairing of its ability to hand relief to the increasing "swarms of immigrants" which descended on the city's quays, found a new challenge in the rescue of the souls of immigrant children. "These persons are ignorant of even the alphabet of useful or domestic economy," wrote one of the Fraternity's women workers about the immigrant poor. She warned that their children could never be instructed "unless they are driven faster by stern necessity from their wretched homes, and compelled to learn some useful occupation." [1o] The New York Children's Aid Society, founded in 1853, went even further by placing children from New York slums with farmer's families in the West, thus rescuing them from the "dangerous classes" and a corrupting environment. Usually half the children shipped west by the Society were immigrants, or of foreign parentage.
Societies such as the New York Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor, the Boston Provident Association, the Howard Mission and the Five Points House of Industry in New York, and the Children's Mission to the Children of the Destitute in Boston all tried to rescue immigrant children by sending them elsewhere. Even if the old generation was lost, the children could be redeemed as Americans.
1d. Letter of John West, May 20, 1831, in Abbott, Immigration Problem, p. 78.
1e. Letter of March 29, 1824, to their parents, in Abbott, Immigration Problem, p. 247.
1f. "An Act Regulating Passenger Ships and Vessels," 1819—ch. 46, The Public Statutes of the United States of America 1789-1845, III (Boston, 1850), 488-489. "An Act to provide for the Ventilation of Passenger Vessels, and for other Purposes," 1848—ch. 41, The Statutes at Large and Treaties of the United States of America, 1845-1851 (Boston, 1851), pp. 220-223.
1h On the increase of Irish factory labor in Lowell see Caroline Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture (New York, 1966), pp. 228-232. Ware argues that the Irish did not displace the native girls, but rather filled the spaces which they had left. The readiness of the Irish to work for low wages, however, precipitated the departure of large numbers of women from the factories.
1j. Theodore Lyman, Jr., Addresses Made to the City Council of Boston (Boston, 1835), pp. 17-24.
1k. In 1850 Catholic boys comprised 41 per cent of the inmates of the State Reform School at Westborough, Massachusetts. Most of these were Irish. The foreign-born population of Massachusetts was 18.93 per cent. Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), pp. 176-177. Similarly, the annual reports of the New York Children's Aid Society suggest that about half the children under the Society's care were immigrants themselves or children of immigrants. The statistical evidence is inconclusive, however, because the reports do not distinguish between immigrant children and children of foreign parentage. Moreover, the reports usually list about 25 per cent of "unknown" origin.
1m. Lane, American Charities, p. 47.