Civil War for the day

Part Four of Errol Morris' blog about Amos Humiston:

In 1870 Dr. Bourns hired Rosa Carmichael. The doctor wrote in his recommendation, “As a teacher and disciplinarian, Mrs. Carmichael has few equals, and she is a most assiduous and faithful worker, laboring often beyond her strength in school and out.” Indeed. She was the Cruella de Vil of the Homestead. Except she was no comic-book villain, she was the real thing. Rumors began that all was not well with the children. Locals noticed that they were no longer allowed to participate in Memorial Day activities like putting on a pageant and decorating graves. The orphans were instead forced to watch while 'happy children' brought flowers to the various cemeteries around town. Edward Woodward, a local veteran, wrote, “They are kept like galley slaves, while strangers decorate their fathers’ graves.” Woodward’s poem was preserved in the Gettysburg College Library, with a letter from the donor introducing the poem and its author:

REV. STANLEY BILLHEIMER, D.D.
226 East Oak Street
PALMYRA, PENNSYLVANIA

28 November 1945
Librarian, Gettysburg College
Possibly the enclosed might find a place among Gettysburgiana. If not, they may be discarded. Woodward, author of the poems, was an eccentric veteran of the Civil War, living on Woodward avenue. He was an umbrella mender, well known to the students of the 80’s and 90’s. He often spoke in rhyme, in ordinary conversation. He was an expert in opening dud shells found on the field.
Respectfully,
Stanley Billheimer, ’91

More stories began to circulate about strange goings-on at the Homestead. Little Lizzie Hutchinson and Bella Hunter were forced to wear boys’ clothes for more than two months as punishment for tearing their dresses. Mrs. Carmichael even conscripted one of the older children to serve as informant and stooge. John Vanderslice, a Philadelphia investigator and Assistant Adjutant General of the Department of Pennsylvania of the Grand Army of the Republic, reported, “The boy beats and kicks in the most cruel manner little children of tender age and does it with the apparent delight of the matron and with her certain approval.” Vanderslice also made his strong opinions about Dr. Bourns evident. He called the Homestead “a summer resort of Dr. Bourns, where he is waited upon by the little inmates, whose fathers sleep in the adjoining cemetery”.
30 May 1876, marked the beginning of the end. The nightmare conditions at the orphanage were finally exposed in a series of newspaper articles. The orphans had been denied food, clothing, and schooling. Not only had they been beaten, but leg-irons and hobbling chains were also used. Were these really necessary? Were the orphans behaving so badly that they needed to be hobbled?
In 1877, Dr. Bourns was charged with embezzling. The charge included “mismanagement, waste of property, and violation of trust”. On 21 December 1877, the Star and Sentinel (the local Gettysburg paper) noted that the orphanage was “about winding up”. On 18 January 1878, the property was seized by the sheriff, and later that year its contents auctioned.

Shortly after my interview, I sent an e-mail to Mark Dunkelman asking him about Dr. Bourns: “Bourns continues to fascinate me. What kind of man preys on widows and children?”
Mark Dunkelman responded: “I get the impression that there were Jekyll and Hyde aspects to Bourns’s personality. At first he used the ambrotype to instigate the wave of publicity that eventually led to Amos’s identification. Most likely he paid for the initial, pre-identification cartes de visite out of his own pocket. And he stipulated that proceeds from the sales of the cartes and the Hayward and Clark sheet music were to benefit the “orphan children”— meaning the Humistons. All of those seem to be acts of true and heartfelt altruism. And Bourns must be given credit for seeing his dream of an orphanage for soldiers’ children become a reality. But at some point after the founding of the Homestead, Bourns went wrong. Was he suffering financial difficulties, or was it simply greed? We don’t know. In addition to the Sunday school monies he embezzled, there’s the question of the sales of the photographs. By then the cartes of the children were being produced in mass quantities. What sort of financial arrangements Bourns had with the manufacturers— and how much of the proceeds went into the doctor’s pocket— I have no idea.”

And then Mark Dunkelman sent me another e-mail, this time going much further into the character of Dr. Bourns and adding recent information that was not available for his book: “During my recent New York research trip, I came across an article, The Gettysburg Orphan Asylum, in the 29 August 1868, issue of The Soldier’s Friend, a newspaper aimed at veterans. It published a letter from a member of a Grand Army of the Republic post inquiring about placing orphans in the Gettysburg asylum, and a reply from Dr. Bourns stipulating the requirements: ‘Orphans are received only on the nomination of shareholding Sabbath-schools. A Post of the GAR might constitute some Sabbath-school a shareholder by contributing the amount of one share ($25) or more, for the purpose, and the school could then nominate the orphan desired to be placed in the institution, only agreeing annually to contribute something toward the maintenance of its orphan ward, the amount of this yearly donation being left entirely to the option of the Sabbath-school. The Homestead being dependent absolutely upon public charity for its existence, the arrangement made with the Sabbath-schools represented by the orphans in the institution secures a handsome yearly revenue to the treasury.’ So in addition to paying $25 to place an orphan in the Homestead, a Sunday school had to make an annual donation toward the support of said orphan. In the end, Bourns was not only cheating the orphans themselves, but all the little Sunday schoolers who supported them.”
The grown Humiston children eventually weighed in on Dr. Bourns’s character. Alice Humiston, in particular, was concerned about recovering the ambrotype from Dr. Bourns. In the Gettysburg Star and Sentinel, 31 October 1914, she was quoted, “He refused to return it, saying that we would receive it at his death. Even then we did not recover it and although my brothers have made a number of efforts since that to find the picture, they were unsuccessful in the work.” And then there is a handwritten notation by Alice on an envelope now in the possession of David Humiston Kelley. It contained a carte-de-visite copy of the original ambrotype. “The original was never handed over to the rightful owners, who were cheated out of all the profits from the sale of the picture by Dr. Francis Bourns who never did a stroke of work after the pictures began to be sold but lived in comfort all his days. He had absolutely nothing until then. So my mother was told by a Lady who knew him well. My mother was young or this would not have happened.”

Dr. Bourns will forever be an enigma. Who was this bachelor who intervened in the lives of the Humiston family? Was he a Good Samaritan, a villain, or something of both? Mark Dunkelman found a diary that Dr. Bourns had kept as a young man. He had read his first book at age eight or nine, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress— the story of how Bunyan’s pilgrim makes his way from the Valley of Humiliation and the Slough of Despond to the Gates of the Celestial City. Did Dr. Bourns imagine himself as a pilgrim on a similar journey?
Among the many clippings collected by David Humiston Kelley is a poem written by Dr. Bourns in 1888 and published in the Episcopal Recorder, about ten years after the demise of the Homestead Orphanage and about ten years before Dr. Bourns’s death on Dec. 20, 1899. It is reprinted in Mark Dunkelman’s book:

Thou Light above! the powers of darkness come,
Environing where thou hast ever shone;
Hope and perception grope in baffling gloom;
Despair’s chill terror in my soul I own,
And hope-abandoned, now I am alone.

But what does the poem mean? Does it humanize Dr. Bourns, or is it merely a villain’s maudlin journey into self-pity? At the very least, the poem tells us that history is always open to reexamination, if only because something new can show up or something forgotten can resurface.

Rico says there's a ton more; click the post title and go read it.