THE SAGA OF JOHNNY MORROW,
THE STREET PEDDLER
OF THE HUNDREDS of thousands of immigrants who passed through Five Points during the nineteenth century, precious few left written records. There are plenty of eyewitness accounts from reformers, journalists, law enforcement officials, and the like, but other than the occasional letter to the editor or affidavit describing a crime, working-class Five Pointers speak directly to us very rarely. A few have managed to narrate their own stories. Perhaps the most fascinating of these is the only one from the pre–Civil War years: a memoir, written by a teenager, of alcoholism, abuse, and life on the streets.1
His name was John Morrow, and he was born in about 1844 to Protestant parents in a village not far from Liverpool, England. He was the third of four children born to a Scottish father, an architect, and an English mother. John remembered his early years as carefree and happy, though when still a young boy he severely injured his left leg in a fall from a swing. The wound (perhaps a bad break) never properly healed, leaving his left leg lame for life. By the time he was full grown, it was three inches shorter than the right.
Far more traumatic to Johnny than his accident was the death of his mother when he was about five. His father remained single for quite some time, but finally remarried. Johnny recalled that his stepmother treated him and his three siblings quite well until she had children of her own, by which point she and his father were fighting a lot. “He would often spend the night away from home, carousing with a few companions, spending in this way much of his hard-earned money; and she would manage, while he was at his daily work, to drink a great deal of whiskey.” Soon she “entirely neglected her household duties, left the table in disorder, the cow unmilked, the children uncared-for, and indeed often entertained carousing friends against father’s will. Finally, in a fit of passion at her conduct, he declared that he would leave the homestead, and emigrate to America, in hopes that a change in circumstances would make things better.” He sold everything they owned, left Johnny’s two older brothers at a free boarding school in Dublin, and took the remainder of the family (including a servant girl whose passage they paid) to New York.2
That the Morrows could afford a servant girl indicates that they were still relatively well off. But in New York, Johnny’s father continued to drink rather than work. After two months, as their nest egg dwindled, he took Johnny out of school so the boy could scavenge firewood and coal to reduce the family’s fuel expenses. After about six months in New York, despite having left England with substantial savings, Johnny’s father was broke.3
Finding it impossible to work as an architect, he took a lowly seventy-five-cent-per-day job in a cabinetmaker’s shop on Chatham Street on the outskirts of Five Points. Johnny’s stepmother earned a few cents per day sewing shirts for garment manufacturers, as did his younger sister Annie. After work, his parents would drink away most of their earnings and beat the kids in frustration. After about a year in New York, Johnny’s father found relatively high-paying work as a house carpenter, but his drinking kept him from holding any job for very long. To cut their expenses, he moved the family uptown to a one-room basement apartment at the corner of Tenth Avenue and 40th Street, a run-down district that would soon become known as “Hell’s Kitchen.”
Meanwhile, Johnny continued to scavenge for fuel. At times his father ordered him to steal nails from construction sites instead, because he needed the two cents a pound they brought from the neighborhood junk dealer to pay for his brandy. “He soon became an almost helpless drunkard,” wrote Johnny, “got out of work, out of money, and, consequently, out of bread. STARVE, was the word!” Time and again Johnny’s father would take an oath of sobriety, but he always fell off the wagon. He pawned most of the family’s possessions to help pay their mounting expenses, which continued to increase as they had more children. By the time Johnny was eleven, in about 1854, he and Annie slept head to toe in a single bed with their half siblings William, Jane, and Margaret Ann. Little Jonathan slept in his parents’ bed.4
At about this point, Johnny was caught stealing lumber. Because of his lameness, he could not run fast enough to escape, and as a result was severely beaten. He came home and insisted he would steal no more, but suggested an alternative. During his days on the streets, he often came across children selling matches door to door. He had learned that the tiny peddlers would buy seventy-two boxes of matches wholesale for twenty-four cents. They took some matches out of each box and wrapped them with string into twenty-five additional bundles, selling the boxes and bundles for a penny a piece. His father consented to let Johnny try match peddling. On his first day he sold his entire stock, and returned home triumphantly with ninety-seven cents. His father spent most of the proceeds on brandy.5
Because of Johnny’s success, his father stopped feeding him breakfast and lunch, insisting that he beg for meals from charitable customers. Soon his older brothers James and Robert, aged seventeen and fifteen, arrived from Dublin. They tried to make it on their own, but shortly moved into the one-room apartment with the rest of the family. Eventually they fought with their father over his drinking, moved out, and were never heard from again. Johnny continued to peddle matches, though he branched out into children’s “picture-books” as well. Willie and Jane entered the profession too. Johnny would work one side of the street, Willie and Jane the other. But their father and mother continued to beat them if they did not come home with enough money to satisfy their addiction.
“My own position was now fast becoming unendurable,” Johnny wrote. “I was liable at any time to be knocked about the room and beaten by my parents, and we children had to work very hard to earn money while they stayed in idleness at home, and drank away a large portion of our earnings.” Johnny and Willie ran away, but three days later, their father found them and beat them “with a piece of clothes-line till the blood came trickling down.” They ran away a second time a few weeks later, but a neighbor told their father where they were and he again dragged them home. When a kind man gave Johnny a $2.50 gold piece, he gave it to his father, hoping their sudden windfall would win his approval. The next morning, his father used it to buy a gallon of brandy. His father and stepmother spent the entire day in bed drunk.6
Johnny and Willie ran away once more, this time for good. To ensure that they would not be caught, they headed downtown to the Sixth Ward and its Newsboys’ Lodging House. The lodging house had been set up in the early 1850s by Charles Loring Brace’s Children’s Aid Society as a refuge for the hundreds of homeless newsboys, bootblacks, and child peddlers who lived on New York’s streets. Before the house opened, these children generally slept in doorways and coal bins; now they could find shelter in a warm, spacious dormitory for just six cents a night.
When Willie and Johnny checked in, they told the superintendent that they were orphans. Johnny felt guilty, though, and the next day told their true story. He was shocked that the society did not inform his parents or try to convince them to return home. But there were dozens of boys in the lodging house who could have told virtually identical stories. The superintendent did mention Johnny’s tale to a reporter, who published it in a religious newspaper, the Independent, under the title “The Boy Who Confessed His Sin.” When Johnny’s Sunday school teacher read the article and recognized his pupil, he insisted that Johnny come live with him in his rooms at the Union Theological Seminary on University Place. Johnny went back to school and supported himself by peddling to the seminarians and on the streets after class. Willie remained at the lodging house.
Remained there, that is, until about a month later when the police picked him up on the street late one night and took him to the House of Refuge, the city’s orphan asylum on Randall’s Island. Johnny begged the authorities to release Willie, but was told that he would stay until someone found him a proper home. Johnny’s Sunday school teacher suggested that they find him one out west through the adoption program run jointly by the Children’s Aid Society and the Five Points House of Industry. About three weeks later, in 1856, Willie boarded a train for Iowa.7
While Willie was at the House of Refuge, their father died and was buried in an unmarked grave in the city’s Potter’s Field. Not long afterward, after Willie had left for Iowa, Johnny’s sister Annie came to the seminary, complaining that her stepmother was mistreating her. Johnny brought her to Rev. W. C. Van Meter, who managed the adoption program run by the Five Points Mission. He sent her to an adoptive family in Iowa City. Johnny tried to help his half sister Jane by setting her up once again as a peddler, but when he saw his stepmother beat her one day because she could not account for all of her merchandise, he decided to have her adopted as well. On the pretense of taking her to get new shoes, he brought her to the Five Points Mission to meet Reverend Van Meter. She told him she would like a new home, and a few weeks later she was adopted by a family in Canton, Illinois. Her mother went to court to try to regain custody of the child, but was rebuffed.
Having lived at the seminary for some time, Johnny developed an ambition to go to college, Yale in particular. He moved to New Haven, where he lived at the Divinity School while supporting himself peddling to the students. In the summer of 1858, after about a year in New Haven, Johnny decided to go out west and find Willie, whom he had not heard from in almost a year. He traveled with Van Meter as far as Chicago, and then continued to Iowa City, where he found Annie living in a comfortable home. On a farm near “Fort Desmoines” he found Willie, who had been passed around to many families in the two years since he left New York. Johnny decided to bring him back to New Haven. On their way back they stopped in Illinois to visit Jane, who, like Annie, had found a good home.8
Willie eventually went back to the West with Van Meter, “to try his fortune again in some kind of family.” The last he and Johnny saw of their stepmother, she was asleep on the bare floor of her apartment on West 17th Street with five-year-old Jonathan. Her only furniture was a pair of chairs. They took the little boy to New Haven, where they eventually put him up for adoption at the New Haven Orphan Asylum. Johnny remained in New Haven, still aspiring one day to study at Yale. With the help of some friends there, while only sixteen, he published his memoir in the hope that the proceeds might someday fund his college education.9
Johnny Morrow’s story may seem extraordinary. Yet at any one time in Five Points there were dozens of boys who could tell similar tales. Over the course of the nineteenth century, thousands of neighborhood children went hungry, were abused by alcoholic parents, and were forced to work on the streets to support themselves or their families. Johnny Morrow’s first sixteen years had been especially harrowing. But in the context of Five Points, what was unusual about his childhood was not his life on the streets but simply that he was given the opportunity to record it for posterity.
Johnny never did enroll at Yale. Just a year after he published A Voice from the Newsboys, he was dead. The cause was “[em]pyema,” an accumulation of pus in the lungs probably associated with a bronchial infection. He was buried on May 26, 1861, in Evergreen Cemetery, Brooklyn.10