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chapter seven Mothers and Children in and out of the Charleston Orphan House john e. murray Destitute,abandoned,and orphaned children faced grim futures in early America , as the essays in this volume testify. But not all poor children were equally vulnerable, and not all futures were equally grim. For poor white children in Charleston, South Carolina, the Orphan House provided some promise of a better life. The Orphan House’s walls were not an impermeable barrier that sealed young residents off from the outside world. Rather, the Orphan House, the first public orphanage in America, was the site of numerous interactions among children, surviving parents, city officials, and masters. Most children who entered were eventually bound out to local tradesmen and housewives,but these apprenticeships were frequently negotiated by watchful and concerned relatives. The ongoing and loving bonds between surviving mothers and the children they had relinquished stand out in the story of the Charleston Orphan House. Care and advocacy given by these mothers to their children after surrendering legal authority over them offers a rich new perspective on poor white families in the antebellum South. When Charleston established the Orphan House in 1790, it was the richest city in the nation. Studies of probate records indicate that the per capita wealth I gratefully acknowledge financial support from a major grant from the Spencer Foundation; archival assistance of James Barkley at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Elizabeth Newcombe at the South Carolina Room, Charleston County Public Library,and especially Harlan Greene at the College of Charleston Library; and comments by Ruth Herndon and David Mitch on an earlier version. mothers and children in the charleston orphan house 103 of Charleston was twice that of New England and the middle colonies, even after including the substantial slave population. Nobody knew it at the time,but the city was near the peak of its prosperity. Indigo production was in decline following withdrawal of British subsidies. Combined with the rise of shortstaple cotton production, the economic heart of the Old South would soon shift westward. Within the old city, planters who saw Charleston as a pleasant residence contended with merchants who wanted to revive the city’s economy. Symbolic of planter victory, the rail line from the cotton-growing upcountry ended at the city’s boundary, well short of the old residential district—and of the wharves from which that cotton was shipped to textile manufacturers across the Atlantic world. But the planters could not hold this line forever. The devastating Panic of 1819, combined with a worldwide decline in cotton prices, led to increased interest in industrial and mercantile activities. By 1850, grist mills,rice mills,iron foundries,turpentine distilleries,and saw mills were all operating within the city. By the eve of the war, Charleston’s wealth had declined dramatically, relative to that of the great northern cities, but in southern terms it was still quite prosperous.1 In 1790 the first census proclaimed that Charleston was the fourth city of the new nation,behind Philadelphia, NewYork,and Boston. The city’s population did grow afterward, but so slowly that the 40,522 Charlestonians who appeared in the 1860 census made it the twenty-second-largest city in the country, less than a quarter the size of Boston. Racially, whites had been in the minority from the onset of record-keeping right up to the 1850 census. White fear of black insurrection led to legal restrictions on black movement that in turn caused the total population to fall in the 1830s and 1850s. During the 1850s, large numbers of Irish and German immigrants settled in the city, many of whom struggled unsuccessfully to keep out of the Poor House. Private efforts to care for the poor focused on particular segments of the population. Over the antebellum period were founded the Hebrew Orphan Society, the Brown Fellowship Society (for free men of color), and a Catholic orphanage to look after impoverished and unfortunate children of deceased brethren.2 For the rest, there was the Orphan House. The Orphan House’s benevolence was aimed at Charleston’s poor and working-class whites, groups that have for the most part avoided the attention of historians. On the rural South, Frank Owsley’s well-known Plain Folk of the Old South sought to rehabilitate the yeoman class: those who may have owned a little bit of land but few, if any, slaves.3 His work influenced later historians such...

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