I am grateful to the librarians and archivists of the New York Academy of Medicine; New York City Municipal Archives and Reference and Research Center; New York Foundling Asylum Archives; New-York Historical Society; New York Public Library; New York Weill Hospital-Cornell Medical Center Archives; and the Sisters of Charity Archives, Mount St. Vincent College, Bronx, New York. I also thank the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association and the Society for the History of Children and Youth for giving me the opportunity to air earlier versions of this essay at their 2005 conferences, and the New York State Historical Association for awarding the 2005 Dixon Ryan Fox Manuscript Prize to the larger work on which this essay is based.

1. Physicians who worked in the almshouse in the antebellum period anecdotally reported that foundlings died at a rate at or close to 100 percent. See the comments of Job Lewis Smith and Elisha Harris in this essay. The official figures of the almshouse tell a different story. Tables in the annual reports of the almshouse for the years 1849–59 (there were no figures for 1857) show an infant death rate that ranged from 36 to 50 percent, with an average of 41.4 percent. (I chose 1849–59 because this is a discrete administrative period in the history of the almshouse — in 1849 the Board of Governors of the Almshouse was established, and in 1860 it was replaced by the Department of Public Charities and Correction.) Despite the seeming exactitude of these figures, they should be taken with a grain of salt for several reasons. First, the almshouse did not always discriminate between foundlings and all the infants in its care. Since foundlings typically died at a significantly higher rate than other babies, these figures are probably low. Also, this was a period of great corruption in city government, and one result was that figures were not always reported accurately. Record keeping generally, corruption aside, was not typically practiced with exactitude in the 19th century. Smith and Harris may have exaggerated up, just as the almshouse may have exaggerated down, but together all these figures demonstrate, however imperfectly, that the death rate of foundlings was perilously high.

2. For early American attitudes toward the poor, see Rothman, David, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown), 1971Google Scholar.

3. For the proliferation of orphanages and other institutions for children starting in the 1830s, see Rothman, , Discovery of the Asylum, ch. 9Google Scholar, and Hacsi, Timothy, Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

4. The first was the New York Orphan Asylum, founded in 1806. It was followed by the Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans; Leake and Watts Orphan House; Orphan's Home and Asylum of the Protestant Episcopal Church; Protestant Half-Orphan Asylum; Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum; St. Joseph's Orphan Asylum; and the Society for the Relief of Half-Orphans and Destitute Children. See Valentine, D. T., Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York for 1860 (New York: D. T. Valentine, 1860), 335–55Google Scholar; King, Moses, King's Handbook of New York City (Boston: Moses King, 1892), 394, 396Google Scholar; and Burrows, Edwin G. and Wallace, Mike, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 811Google Scholar.

5. New York Foundling Asylum (referred to subsequently as NYFA), Souvenir of 1889, in NYFA, biennial report, 1888–90, [16], in Microfilm Division, New York Public Library.

6. Nursery and Child's Hospital (referred to subsequently as NCH), annual report, 1879, 7, in New York Weill Hospital-Cornell Medical Center Archives, New York.

7. Almshouse, annual report, 1847, 6. Annual reports of the almshouse, and its successor, the Commissioners of Public Charities and Corrections are at the Microfilm Division, New York Public Library, and the Municipal Archives and Municipal Reference and Research Center of the New York City Department of Records and Information Services.

8. On the almshouse's view of pauperism as a crime to be addressed by punitive measures, see Mohl, Raymond, Poverty in New York, 1783–1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 65Google Scholar.

9. Almshouse, annual report, 1849, 194–95.

10. Almshouse, annual report, 1856, xl-xli. For Draper's career, see Bridges, Amy, A City in the Republic: Antebellum New York and the Origins of Machine Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 130CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Homburger, Eric, Scenes from the Life of a City: Corruption and Conscience in Old New York (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 141–42Google Scholar.

11. “Foundling Babies: How They are Cared For,” New York Times, 02 14, 1859Google Scholar.

12. For the use of street and day names for European foundlings, see Fuchs, Rachel, Abandoned Children: Foundlings and Child Welfare in Nineteenth-Century France (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), 110Google Scholar; Kertzer, David, Sacrificed for Honor: Infant Abandonment and the Politics of Reproductive Control (Boston: Beacon, 1993), 122Google Scholar; and Robins, Joseph, The Lost Children: A Study of Charity Children in Ireland, 1700–1900 (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 1980), 7Google Scholar. Almshouse Children's Records, New York City Municipal Archives, James Secondstreet, vol. 0161, April 27-June 8, 1821; James Bowery, vol. 081, September 26, 1860; Jane Broadway, vol. 082, June 21, 1863. Volume 214, all 1807: Juliana Saturday, p. 80; Caroline Monday, p. 92; and Clarinda Friday, p. 118. Leonora Monday, vol. 0161, December 21, 1821. Mary Monday, vols. 0160 and 0161, December 20, 1822-December 31, 1824.

13. John J. Astor, no. 112, January 3, 1840; and Oliver Twist, no. 184, May 19, 1841, both in Almshouse Foundling Volume, New-York Historical Society (referred to subsequently as AHFV-NYHS — cataloged inaccurately at the New-York Historical Society as Foundling Hospital Indentures, 1838–40). Babies surnamed “Foundling” appear mainly in Almshouse Children's Records, vol. 0161, December 24, 1819-March 26, 1824. William Unknown, Almshouse Children's Records, vol. 0161, February 4 and April 14, 1820. The practice of a giving a foundling the surname “Unknown” can be compared to the Italian use of “Incogniti” as a foundling name (see Kertzer, , Sacrificed for Honor, 120Google Scholar).

14. Smith, J. Lewis, “Hindrances to the Successful Treatment of the Diseases of Infancy and Childhood,” Transactions of the New York State Medical Association 13 (1896): 95Google Scholar.

15. “Ashcan Baby Finds a Home in Fifth Avenue,” New York Herald, Sunday Magazine, 12 26, 1909Google Scholar.

16. For the decline in the infant death rate starting in the 1890s, see Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health, ed. Leavitt, Judith Walzer and Numbers, Ronald L. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 3–10Google Scholar; Meckel, Richard A., introduction to Save the Babies: American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850–1929 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Preston, Samuel and Haines, Michael, The Fatal Years: Child Mortality in Late Nineteenth Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 208–9Google Scholar.

17. Halliday, Samuel B., The Lost and Found; or, Life Among the Poor (New York: Blakeman and Mason, 1859), 148Google Scholar.

18. Records of the almshouse's dealings with these women are in the AHFV-NYHS, which includes a section recording information about women available to nurse, and in the nurses's pay books and children's records maintained by the almshouse and now available at the New York City Municipal Archives.

19. Almshouse infants typically stayed with their nurses for one or two years until they were weaned (see Almshouse, annual reports, 1846, 387; and 1848, 42–43). The almshouse reports contain many mentions of indenture of almshouse children. See, for instance, the report of almshouse “visitor” John McGrath. The almshouse sent McGrath to check on the welfare of children apprenticed and adopted, including some foundlings (“Report of Mr. John McGrath, Visitor, Relative to Children Indentured from the Alms House Department,” in Almshouse, annual report, 1846).

20. Valentine, , Manual of the Corporation, 432Google Scholar.

21. New York Almshouse and Bridewell minutes, May 2, 1796, Manuscript Division, New York Public Library.

22. Almshouse, annual report, 1848, 42.

23. Ibid., 1851, 128.

24. Commissioners of Public Charities and Corrections (this was the body that succeeded the Board of Governors in 1860, hereafter referred to as PCC), annual report, 1863, viii.

25. [Stephen Smith], “A Statement in Behalf of the New York Infant Asylum.” This document is bound together with the New York Infant Asylum (hereafter referred to as NYIA) report for 1872, New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center Archives, New York.

26. McClure, Ruth, Coram's Children: The London Foundling Hospital in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27. The Foundling Asylum's first admissions book shows that between October 12, 1869, when it took in its first foundling, and the last day of November, 1869, it took in forty-nine babies (Admissions Book, 1869–92, New York Foundling Hospital Archives). For the number received during the year between October 1, 1870, and October 1, 1871, see NYFA, biennial report, 1869–71, 12; and, for the crowded building, 7.

28. Arnott, Margaret L., “Infant Death, Child Care and the State: The Baby-Farming Scandal and the First Infant Life Protection Legislation of 1872,” Continuity and Change 9 (1994): 271–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rose, Lionel, Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Great Britain, 1800–1939 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 93–114Google Scholar.

29. See, for instance, “A Statement in Behalf of the New York Infant Asylum” (5) which describes “private institutions” where unwanted babies were accepted “with a distinct understanding of all parties that they would not long survive.”

3 0. As quoted in NCH, annual report, 1879, 7.

31. For the general anxiety in this period about poor working women and child neglect, see Gordon, Linda, “Single Mothers and Child Neglect, 1880–1920,” American Quarterly 37 (Summer 1985): 175–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32. “Foundling Babies: How They are Cared For,” New York Times, 02 14, 1859Google Scholar; and “The Foundlings of the City: Munificent Charity of New-York,” New York Tribune, 02 14, 1859Google Scholar. The tone of this article indicates that its title is meant to be sarcastic.

33. For the articulation of middle-class life, including the “separate sphere” for women, in antebellum America, see Blumin, Stuart, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Dye, Nancy Schrom, “Mother Love and Infant Death, 1750–1920,” Journal of American History 73, no. 2 (09 1986): 329–53CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Halttunen, Karen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; and Welter, Barbara, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18, part 2, no. 1 (Summer 1966): 151–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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35. There is some confusion about this date. Mary Du Bois had an uncertain recollection of the date of Mott and Halliday's survey, noting in one place that it occurred in 1853–54 and in another as 1856–57 (see Du Bois, Mary, “Thirty Years Experience in Hospital Work,” in Infant Asylums and Children's Hospitals: Medical Dilemmas and Developments, 1850–1920: An Anthology of Sources, ed. Golden, Janet [New York: Garland, 1989], 14Google Scholar; and NCH, annual reports, 1876, 10, and 1879, 8). Halliday, himself wrote that the survey occurred “some two years since” in his book Lost and Found, which was published in 1859Google Scholar. In 1859 the New York Tribune also reports that Halliday's survey took place “two years ago” (see “The Murder of the Innocents,” New York Tribune, 02 9, 1859Google Scholar). Based on this evidence I think Mott and Halliday's tour took place in 1857.

36. For Mott's role see Halliday, , Lost and Found, 148–49Google Scholar. Mott accompanied Halliday at first, but then dropped out because of age-related infirmity.

37. “The Murder of the Innocents,” New York Tribune, 02 9, 1859Google Scholar. This article, dealing with the Mary Cullough scandal, reprints Halliday's report of two years earlier.

38. Halliday, , Lost and Found, 149Google Scholar.

39. Halliday, Samuel B., The Little Street Sweeper or, Life Among the Poor (New York: Phinney, Blakeman, and Mason, 1860), 155Google Scholar.

40. The reports the two committees produced are Galpin, Samuel, Frazer, John C., and Ross, George, Report of the Select Committee on Foundling Hospital, Document 17, in Documents of the New York City Board of Councilmen, vol. 5 (New York, 1858)Google Scholar; and Isaac Townsend, Washington Smith, and Anthony Dugro, “Report of the Select Committee, Appointed March 17, 1857, by the Board of Governors of the Almshouse, New-York, Deputed to Investigate the Claims of the City to the Institution and Erection of a Foundling Hospital,” in Almshouse, annual report, 1858. These are referred to subsequently as Councilmen's foundling committee report and Almshouse foundling committee report. For Halliday's testimony and its reception, see Councilmen's foundling committee report, 5–6; Halliday, , Little Street Sweeper, 153–54Google Scholar; and NCH, annual report, 1879, 8–9. Halliday, 's report was republished in “The Murder of the Innocents,” New York Tribune, 02 9, 1859Google Scholar.

41. “Murder of the Innocents,” New York Tribune, 02 5, 1859Google Scholar. For the Cullough scandal, see also “Foundling Babies: How They Are Cared For,” New York Times, 02 14, 1859Google Scholar; “The Foundlings of the City,” New York Tribune, 02 14, 1859Google Scholar; “The Slaughter of the Innocents,” New York Times, 02 17, 1859Google Scholar; and “How the Alms-House Children are Reared,” Harper's Weekly, 02 19, 1859Google Scholar.

42. “How the Alms-House Children are Reared,” Harper's Weekly, 02 19, 1859, 117Google Scholar. For the simianized Irishman, see Curtis, L. Perry Jr, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971), esp. 94–108Google Scholar.

43. “New York as Nursing Mother to her Foundlings,” Harper's Weekly, 02 26, 1859Google Scholar; and “The Slaughter of the Innocents,” New York Times,” 02 17, 1859Google Scholar.

44. The Apprentice's Library of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen opened in 1820, while the Bowery Theater (1826) and the Park Theater (1798) were two of the places where the working class in antebellum New York could go to see plays (see King, , King's Handbook, 297, 534, 536Google Scholar).

45. Shakespeare, , The Winter's Tale, 3.3.70–74Google Scholar.

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49. “The Slaughter of the Innocents,” New York Times, 02 17, 1859Google Scholar.

50. Councilmen's foundling committee report, 5.

51. Almshouse governors' foundling committee report, xxxviii–xl.

52. Metropolitan Board of Health, annual report, 1866, 10.

53. Ibid., 152.

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55. Medical Record, November 16, 1868, 427.

56. NCH, annual report, 1859, 5–6.

57. Councilmen's foundling committee report, 8; “The Infants' Home: Laying of the Corner Stone,” New York Times, 12 29, 1859Google Scholar; and NCH, annual report, 1876, 8–9.

58. PCC, annual reports, 1866, viii; 1868, [307], 340; and 1869, 13, 117; and NYFA, biennial report, 1869–71, 7.

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60. Councilmen's foundling committee report, 5.

61. Ibid., 1–4.

62. NYFA, annual report, 1872, [5].

63. Higginbotham, Ann R., “‘Sin of the Age’: Infanticide and Illegitimacy in Victorian London,” Victorian Studies 32 (Spring 1988): 319–37Google Scholar; and NCH, annual report, 1879, 7.

64. Reese, David Meredith, Report on Infant Mortality in Large Cities: The Sources of Its Increase, and Means for Its Diminution (Philadelphia: American Medical Association, 1857)Google Scholar.

65. Ibid., 9.

66. Ibid., 14.

67. The almshouse governors' resolution establishing a committee to investigate the possibility of a foundling asylum was passed on March 17, 1857. Horatio R. Storer's anti-abortion crusade took root with a resolution passed at the Suffolk County Medical Society in May, 1857, and in a committee formed at the 1859 annual meeting of the American Medical Association (Mohr, James C., Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 1800–1900 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1978], 152, 154)Google Scholar. On the antiabortion crusade, see also Brodie, Janet Farrell, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Grossberg, Michael, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, “The Abortion Movement and the AMA, 1850–1880,” in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America, ed. Smith-Rosenberg, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 217–44Google Scholar.

68. Reese, David Meredith, Humbugs of New York: Being a Remonstrance Against Popular Delusion; Whether in Science, Philosophy, or Religion (New York: John S. Taylor, 1838), 125Google Scholar. For the struggles of the medical profession, see Numbers, Ronald L., “The Fall and Rise of the American Medical Profession,” in Leavitt, and Numbers, , Sickness and HealthGoogle Scholar.

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70. Almshouse foundling committee report, xxxvi. For the Councilmen's statement on this theme see their foundling committee report (1–2).

71. NCH, annual report, 1872, 11–13.

72. Almshouse foundling committee report, lxviii.

73. Gilfoyle, Timothy, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992)Google Scholar.

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