Children Lost and Found: Reconstructing the History of the Friends’ Asylum for Colored Orphans

This paper examines the campaign to establish a permanent orphan asylum for African American children in Richmond, Virginia in the 1870s.  It considers why some black Richmonders believed the asylum would better protect orphaned black children than existing public and informal approaches, and whether it did so.  During the Civil War, Union forces, in conjunction with northern missionaries, established a temporary orphan asylum to care for the youngest displaced freed children.  Yet, it was only the advocacy of local African American women that ensured the asylum was incorporated on a permanent basis.  Like other asylums in the city, the Friends’ Asylum insisted that parents who placed children with the institution yield rights to reclaim children.  It also employed indenture in managing its population.  If the practices of the asylum were in many ways conventional, it seems likely that the promise of better protection came from the knowledge and experiences of its champions. Lucy Goode Brookes, a leader in the effort to establish the asylum, had herself lost children through the forced separation of slave sale.  All had witnessed the hardship of children left to navigate the city on their own.  This paper explores how the legacy of slavery’s disruptions to African American families and the abuses of apprenticeship by local and federal officials during Reconstruction shaped the effort to establish the Friends’ Asylum for Colored Orphans and its practices.  It contends that the success of the institution depended on its leaders’ ability to forge a multiracial, interregional coalition of supporters, it capacity to create a space for African American women to engage in the civic life of the city, and the willingness of parents and children who came into its orbit to believe in its promise of protection.