The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce

rogues!” as he wrote his sister in one letter. His orphan trains were sometimes filled after CAS representatives went into New York’s tenement neighborhoods to recruit “orphans” from immigrant families. As for those families, O’Connor wrote that Brace “dismissed contemptuously those parents who stood in the way of what he thought were a child’s best interests, including the removal of the child to a ‘better’ home.”
    This in itself was not without precedent. In the 1830s to 1850s devout Congregationalist missionaries from abolitionist churches in the Northeast—the same background Brace hailed from—began adopting children from the mission field in Jamaica, where slavery became illegal in 1838, said Gale Kenny, a religion scholar at Barnard College. Frustrated with the persistent influence of Baptist practices among the Jamaican adults they were evangelizing, the missionaries decided that “the only way theycan have a real impact is if they focus on converting children, separating them from their parents and their culture to bring them up in their own homes,” explains Kenny. The movement treated adoption as a civilizing project, assimilating Jamaican children who were born of freed slaves who had labored on sugar estates, into white, Christian culture. In one instance children were separated from their families to be raised at a missionary school built on a converted sugar plantation, where they farmed sugar cane in exchange for their tuition—perhaps a dubious improvement over the past.
    Likewise, the orphan train movement’s efforts to place children in families that would treat them as kin instead often resulted in placements that resembled employer-employee relationships or, worse, indentured servanthood. CAS had an extremely limited capacity to check up on placements, leading to many stories of abuse and runaways. The organization later performed a statistical analysis that found that only one-fifth of children placed from orphan trains had a family experience comparable to today’s understanding of adoption.
    But Brace’s argument ran deeper than simply charity. In CAS fundraising appeals he stirred both his readers’ sense of Christian philanthropy and their middle-class fears of a rising generation of poor, urban children taking over New York. These children, Brace wrote, “will soon form the great lower class of our city,” influencing elections and bolstering the ranks of criminals. CAS promised that they were “draining the city of these children, by communicating with farmers, manufacturers, or families in the country” who could put these junior members of the dangerous classes “in the way of an honest living.” It was an argument for adoption that sounds similar to some adoption rescue pitches today. In fact, Brace’s The Dangerous Classes is a recommendation in the Christian Alliance for Orphans’ online resource library.
    After the orphan train program began in 1854, it grew increasingly popular until eventually, by the 1870s, it had spawned similar programs in other cities. O’Connor wrote that among genteel organizations, “the idea of rescuing ‘friendless’ children by finding homes for them became almost fashionable.” One prominent women’s magazine even regularly featured descriptions of poor and orphaned children, asking readers to take them in.
    In the slums, however, there was a widespread suspicion that CAS was engaging in a Protestant plot to destroy the Catholic faith of Irish or Italian immigrants—akin to a form of ethnic cleansing. “Practically from its foundation, the Children’s Aid Society was one of the Protestant relieforganizations most hated by Catholics, largely because of its Emigration Plan, which was commonly seen as little more than institutionalized child snatching,” wrote O’Connor. “A multipaneled cartoon in an Irish American newspaper portrayed one of the society’s agents as a dour ghoul who only smiles when a westerner gives