Abandoned: Foundlings in Nineteenth-Century New York City

Notes

Notes n o t e s to t h e i n t ro du c t i o n 1. Oliver Twist, AFV, no. 184, May 19, 1841; Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (London: Penguin, 1972), 127–44. Oliver Twist was first published in Bentley’s Miscellany in 1837. 2. That J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, an orphaned, legitimate baby, is left on a doorstep, and that Harry’s legitimacy is taken for granted throughout the series , demonstrates how thoroughly the association between illegitimacy and infant abandonment has been forgotten in the twenty-first century. 3. Charles Smith Pugsley, AFV, no. 65, February 15, 1839. 4. For abandonments resulting in death, see Howard [pseud.], “Domestic Economy,” National Advocate, June 6, 1820. When a woman named Omey Kirk was turned away from the almshouse and gave birth in a nearby yard, her infant was found, alive, by a group of children as pigs approached the baby, who “but for the accidental discovery of the children, would infallibly have been devoured.” A Faithful Report of the Trial of the Cause of Philip I. Arcularius . . . (New York: Bernard Dornin, 1807), 4. I am grateful to Margaret Hofer of the New-York Historical Society for bringing this case to my attention. 5. This attitude gradually changed during the nineteenth century. Nancy Schrom Dye and Daniel Blake Smith, “Mother Love and Infant Death, 1750– 1920,” Journal of American History 73 (September 1986): 329–53; Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience , and the Self in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge , MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 6. Gert Brieger, “Stephen Smith: Surgeon and Reformer” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1971), 196. 7. For New York’s development in the nineteenth century as a center of both poverty and wealth, see Robert Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 1815–1860 (New York: Scribner’s, 1839); Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Thomas Kessner, Capital City: New York City and the Men behind America’s Rise to Economic Dominance, 1860–1900 (New York: Simon and 243 Schuster, 2003); Raymond Mohl, Poverty in New York, 1783–1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). 8. For more on St. Mary’s Asylum for Widows, Foundlings, and Infants, incorporated in Buffalo, New York, by the Sisters of Charity, see William Pryor Letchworth, “History of Child-Saving Work in the State of New York,” in History of Child Saving in the United States: Twentieth National Conference of Charities and Correction, Chicago, June 1893 (Boston: Geo. H. Ellis, 1893), 165. 9. The Temporary Home for foundlings opened in Boston around 1864, and the Massachusetts Infant Asylum for foundlings and other “deserted and destitute infant children” was chartered in 1867 and opened in 1868; see Massachusetts Infant Asylum, annual reports, 1868, 5, 16–17; 1869, 8, 34. The Chicago Foundlings Home opened in 1871; see George E. Shipman, God’s Dealings with the Chicago Foundlings Home (Chicago: George E. Shipman, M.D., 1888). The San Francisco Foundling Asylum opened around 1869; see Bruce Come, “Asylum or Adoption: The Foundling in Progressive San Francisco” (MA thesis, California State University, Hayward, 1992). The Washington Hospital for Foundlings was incorporated by Congress for the District of Columbia in 1870 and opened in 1887; see Report of the President of the Washington Hospital for Foundlings to the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1902), p. 5; “An Act for Incorporating a Hospital for Foundlings in the City of Washington,” 41st Congress, 2d Session, chap. 61. 10. Based on a survey, the Massachusetts Infant Asylum concluded, “The city of New York has done the most in this direction, as is natural where the number of such infants is the largest” Massachusetts Infant Asylum, Annual Report , 1868, 30. For a later comparison between New York and Chicago, Boston , Baltimore, and Buffalo, see Homer Folks, “The Foundling,” in International Congress on Hygiene and Demography 15, Transactions (Washington, DC, 1912), 87. Between 1895 and 1904 the Washington Hospital for Foundlings reported collecting an average of fifty-two foundlings each year; see Washington Hospital for Foundlings, annual reports, 1895–1904. In 1880 at the Chicago Foundlings Home the average number of...