Names in alphabetical order.

Abstract: This study examines the use of slave labor by the Charleston Orphan House, an institution widely acclaimed to be the first public orphanage for white children in the United States. The institution, which was founded in 1790, hired, purchased, and acquired through natural birth, gift, and bequest more than 100 slaves before the Civil War. All of the slaves worked in domestic labor of one sort or another. From 1790 to 1803, the orphanage utilized hired slave labor alone, but in 1804 it purchased its first group of slaves. This study traces the challenges that the officials of the institution faced between 1790 and the eve of the Civil War, and their efforts to face many of these challenges through hiring and buying slaves. The study pays particular attention to the institution's quest to provide a service to poor and orphaned white children in part through the use of slaves.

The first public orphanage in America, the Charleston Orphan House saw to the welfare and education of thousands of children from poor white families in the urban South. From wealthy benefactors to the families who sought its assistance to the artisans and merchants who relied on its charges as apprentices, the Orphan House was a critical component of the city’s social fabric. By bringing together white citizens from all levels of society, it also played a powerful political role in maintaining the prevailing social order. John E. Murray tells the story of the Charleston Orphan House for the first time through the words of those who lived there or had family members who did. Through their letters and petitions, the book follows the families from the events and decisions that led them to the Charleston Orphan House through the children’s time spent there to, in a few cases, their later adult lives. What these accounts reveal are families struggling to maintain ties after catastrophic loss and to preserve bonds with children who no longer lived under their roofs. An intimate glimpse into the lives of the white poor in early American history, The Charleston Orphan House is moreover an illuminating look at social welfare provision in the antebellum South.

"In The Charleston Orphan House, distinguished economic historian John E. Murray uncovers a world about which previous generations of scholars knew next to nothing: the world of orphaned children in early national and antebellum America. Employing a unique cache of records, Murray offers a sensitive and sympathetic account of the history of the institution - the first public orphan house in the US - while at the same time making it clear that Charleston's beneficence toward white orphans was inextricably linked to the racial ideology of the city's leaders. In Murray's hands, the voices of poor white families in early America are heard as never before." -- Peter A Coclanis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. -- Book jacket.