The Charleston Orphan House: Children’s Lives in the First Public Orphanage in America by John E. Murray (review)

Between 1790 and 1860, the Charleston Orphan House—the nation’s first public orphanage—housed more than 2,000 poor white children, most of them between the ages of six and twelve. By plumbing the extensive records of the orphanage—including admission applications, board minutes, physicians’ reports, apprenticeship indentures, financial records, and physicians’ reports—Murray is able to offer statistical data about, and qualitative evaluations of, multiple facets of poor children’s lives, not only during their tenure at the Orphan House but also prior to their admission, during their apprenticeships, and, in some cases, well into their adult lives.

One of the most valuable aspects of this data set are letters from family members and other adult caretakers, which detail the circumstances that led them to surrender children to the Orphan House, to request their return, or to intervene on their behalf. Because cost-conscious commissioners with strict definitions of what constituted the “deserving poor” conducted individual investigations, including house visits, before responding to such requests, the authors of the letters had a strong incentive to offer factually accurate information about themselves and their charges, knowing that any falsehoods would likely be discovered and held against them. “The sum total of all these inquiries and responses,” Murray asserts, “may be the single greatest collection of first-person reports on work and family lives of the poor anywhere in the United States that covers the entire period between the Revolution and the Civil War” (4).

Combining quantitative methods with qualitative analysis, Murray is able to offer scholars of family life and gender roles much more plausible generalizations about poor Americans’ family dynamics than previously has been possible. For instance, a statistical shift from the pattern in the early decades, when most children left the orphanage for apprenticeships, to the later decades, when most children left the orphanage to be reunited with their families, supports the contention that poor white southerners, like their more fortunate neighbors, adopted the modern ideal of a child-centered family in the nineteenth century. The increasing centrality of mothers to family life likewise seems to characterize poor families as well as privileged ones. Mothers sponsored the vast majority of the orphanage’s inhabitants, and most of the orphans who returned to their families did so in accord with their mother’s wishes—and increasingly, during the period, with the support of stepfathers.

Historians of social welfare and social policy, who know much more about Victorian- and Progressive-era institutions in New England and Midwestern cities, will be intrigued to learn that even before the Civil War, the term orphan was a misnomer, since the vast majority of orphanage residents had at least one living parent, usually a widowed and destitute mother. The same readers may be surprised to learn that the Charleston Orphan House required relatively little labor from its male occupants (the girls, as in other institutions, were responsible for sewing and laundry) and provided remarkably good education and health care for both boys and girls. Most striking is that the institution offered both so-called orphans and surviving parents a high degree of agency, including veto power over undesirable apprenticeships. Although readers may not be fully convinced by Murray’s explanation that white Charlestonians’ desire for racial unity contributed to the relatively benevolent, noncoercive nature of the Charleston Orphan House, there certainly seems to be something regionally distinctive about the nation’s first public orphanage.