Charles Loring Brace

• Charles Brace
• Born: June 19, 1826
• Died: August 11, 1890

Philanthropist, was born in Litchfield, Connecticut to John and Lucy (Porter) Brace. His mother, related to the progressive Beecher family, died when he was fourteen years old. Brace received most of his early education from his father, who taught at an academy for young women.

Brace entered Yale College in 1842 and was graduated with honors four years later. Raised in the Congregational church, he became a church member while attending Yale. As an undergraduate, he also decided to become a minister. After briefly teaching at two schools, he returned to New Haven, Connecticut, to enroll in the Yale Divinity School in 1847. Though deeply religious, he came to feel that he was not suited for the conventional parish ministry. Much affected by the liberalizing influence of Yale’s Horace Bushnell, a Congregational Brace was unable to fully accept orthodox doctrines. The heart of his faith was a fervent belief in a merciful God who would forgive the sincerely repentant. Rather than the traditional ministry, Brace sought one in which he could put his beliefs into practice, one in which he could express his faith in God by helping others.

He moved to New York City in 1848, to continue his theological studies, and soon he was working among the poorest people, preaching to them on Sundays. These philanthropic efforts were interrupted by a trip to Britain and the Continent in 1850. Accompanied during the early part of this trip by John and Frederick Law Olmsted, his life-long friends, Brace stayed to study in Germany and to travel in Hungary. There he was imprisoned as a supporter of the Hangarian independence movement and was released after a month only because of strong appeals from the American envoy. While in Europe, he committed himself to working among the poor in his own country. This sense of dedication he recorded later in his autobiography “I have a kind of feeling growing on me that my only and great business in the world is men-helping.”

On his return to the United States in 1852, Brace began preaching to poor boys in New York City. As a result of these efforts, when the Children’s Aid Society was formed there in January 1853, Brace was appointed secretary, an office he held until his death. He worked tirelessly on behalf of the society, recruiting children out of the city’s slums and helping to win the financial support of the wealthy and middle classes. Brace shaped the group’s policy and projects; industrial schools were established in other urban areas to train children, mainly the sons and daughters of Irish and German immigrants, in self-discipline and basic skills. Lodg-inghouses were also established for working children with room and board provided for them at inexpensive rates in a decent environments.

Brace’s favorite project was relocating city children to homes in farming areas and small towns, where they could escape corrupting influences and make productive lives for themselves. Above all, he stressed the importance of training children to be self-reliant rather than treating them as dependents. Under his supervision, the Children’s Aid Society grew steadily and was able to provide such services as summer camps and a sanitarium for city children.

Though dedicated to the society, Brace was involved in other work as well. As a young man, he had been bitterly opposed to slavery, which he considered sinful and a national disgrace. Not an abolitionist himself, he deeply admired those who were for their dedication to what they believed to be the cause of truth and justice. In 1848 he wrote of his hope to see a free-soil party organized. A frequent contributor to New York’s newspapers, he supported John C. Fremont’s candidacy on the Republican ticket in 1856 and Abraham Lincoln’s in 1860. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Brace became a fervent supporter of the Union cause. From the outset he regarded the conflict as a war against slavery, and he contributed articles to newspapers to promote emancipation as a war measure.

Brace was also a scholar and the author of several books. The most important to him was Gesta Christi; or a History of Humane Progress under Christianity (1882). In this work he argued that Christianity, though not necessarily the institutional churches, had been the major force in advancing progress, and he was sure that this process would continue. Though a critic of selfishness in business, of love of office in politics, and of formalism in the churches, Brace was an optimist who foresaw a future of peace and justice.

Unlike many other Christians of his day, Brace was even able to find comfort in the Darwinian theory of evolution. He saw in it a “law of progress” that suggested the spiritual advancement of humankind. “Evil must die ultimately as the weaker element, in the struggle with good,” he observed in his autobiography. As a Christian evolutionist, he believed, among other things, that war would disappear and that cooperation between labor and capital, based on a greater share for labor, would come to prevail.

Brace’s philanthropic work and his warm personality won him distinguished friends on both sides of the Atlantic. He made a number of trips to Britain and the Continent. He died on such a trip in England at the age of sixty-four. He was survived by his wife Letitia Neill Brace, whom he had married on August 24, 1854, and by several children.

Brace’s autobiography, The Life of Charles Loring Brace, appeared in 1894. His publications included, in addition to Gesta Christi, The Dangerous Classes of New York (1872) and The Races of the Old World (1863). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1929) and the obituary in The New York Times, August 14, 1890.