"City of Refuge": Child Refugees and Soldiers' Orphans in Civil War St. Louis

In the mid-1850s, John Rose and his wife, Melissa, moved from Tennessee to Sugar Loaf Township, Arkansas. Rose purchased land and started a farm that was apparently large enough to support his young family.¹ In 1860, the Roses welcomed the last of their six children into the world. Although Arkansas was a slave state, Rose was not a slaveholder, and when Arkansas voted to secede from the United States, he enlisted as a private in the Union army. After he was killed by "Guerrilla Indians," Melissa Rose and her children fled to St. Louis, where she died in a refugee home in March 1865.² Several of the children, including Winnie, Jesse, Henry, and Leroy ended up in an institution established for the children of Union soldiers on the outskirts of St. Louis. One by one, the Rose children left the institution to be incorporated into other families.³ Although tragic, the shattering of the Rose family and subsequent situation of the Rose children were far from unique.

Staggering numbers of child refugees converged on St. Louis in the early years of the war, and their numbers continued to swell afterward. Approximately half of all refugees entering St. Louis were children. Many of the refugees flowing into the city claimed to harbor Union loyalties or were escaped slaves. A beacon of safety in an otherwise tumultuous South, St. Louis attracted men, women, and children from throughout the Mississippi Valley and as far away as Texas. As the major rail and water hub linking the South to the Midwest, the city served as a waypoint for those seeking refuge in the North. Life in the Confederacy was not easy, and neither was the trek endured by displaced people. Both black and white families braved hunger, exhaustion, and violence to reach safety. Many parents died on the way, and many children became orphans en route to St. Louis or shortly after arrival. Those fortunate enough not to lose both parents often had to wait years to be reunited with their fathers, who had been conscripted into military service.

Attempts to address the refugee crisis reflected the efforts of the state's philanthropists and representatives to work out and define criteria that distinguished between the deserving and undeserving. Race, social class, and region all played significant roles. However, service to the Union received greatest merit. Just as women pressed for assistance because of their husbands and sons' willing sacrifices, philanthropists argued that soldiers' orphans also warranted special regard based on the loss of their fathers. Children who did not fit this category, including black and white children from the Confederacy, benefited from charitable assistance but did not receive the same considerations. In short, service to the state marked some children as deserving childhoods that more closely resembled the ideals of aid workers.

Scholars have directed little attention toward the link between fathers' service to the Union and children's claims to enhanced protection. Given how much is known about women's claims to special rights based on the sacrifice of husbands and sons, this is especially surprising.⁴ For example, Stephanie McCurry argues, "few ideas in Southern political life in the Civil War acquired more public legitimacy" as the idea that the sacrifices of men obligated the state to care for their families.⁵ Women routinely pressed the state to meet its pledge. As the experiences of child refugees and soldiers' orphans demonstrate, the state and private organizations took this guarantee seriously, and the treatment of displaced children reflected this fact. The justifications for the special treatment of such children also presaged efforts by Civil War veterans and veterans' widows and orphans to secure increasingly generous pensions in the decades following the war.⁶

Although historians have written about certain groups of refugees, surprisingly little attention has been directed toward the experiences of child refugees and war orphans. This is more surprising given that in certain places, such as St. Louis, around half of displaced persons were children. As David Silkenat points out, scholarly trends emphasize particular clusters of...