"On the afternoon of Sunday, April 22, 1866, a tall, thin, fifty-two-year-old wealthy New Yorker in a silk top hat stepped out of his carriage at the corner of Broadway and 23rd Street, walked across the cobblestones, put himself directly between a streetcar driver's raised whip and the bleeding back of an exhausted horse, and said — in the flat precise voice of a man who had made a decision some days earlier and was merely now executing it — 'My friend. You can't do that anymore.' The driver, whose name was not recorded, swore at him. Called him mad. Lifted the whip again. The man in the top hat pulled from inside his coat a folded paper containing the full text of an act passed by the New York State Legislature nine days earlier — the first effective animal-cruelty law in American history — and he told the driver, still with the same flat precision, that he was now under arrest. A small crowd gathered. The crowd laughed. The crowd did not know what it was watching. The crowd thought it was a comedy — a rich eccentric interfering with a working man doing his job. A twenty-three-year-old Irish-immigrant scullery maid named Moira Reilly, who was walking home from her half-day off and who had stopped to watch, did not laugh. She had spent the preceding five years as the youngest of seven servants in a Fifth Avenue household in which she had seen, on a near-weekly basis, the handyman's terrier kicked so hard he could not walk, a pony drowned in the carriage-house cistern for having slipped on ice, and — three weeks earlier — the housekeeper's nine-year-old niece, who had been sent to work as a bonded servant at the age of six, beaten with a leather strap until she had stopped moving. Moira Reilly had not known, until that afternoon on 23rd Street, that any of the things she had seen were against the law. She had not known that a law of this kind could exist. She watched the man in the top hat — whose name, she learned from the murmurs of the crowd, was Henry Bergh — arrest the streetcar driver, take the horse's reins, and personally lead the horse three blocks to the nearest livery stable. She followed him. She did not know why she was following him. She would, years later, say that she was following him because he was the first grown man she had ever seen, in her twenty-three years of life, use his power for something other than to hurt a smaller creature. She worked up the courage to speak to him at the stable gate. She asked him: 'Sir. Does your new law — does it only apply to animals?' Henry Bergh looked at her for a long time. Then he said: 'Miss. At present, yes. It only applies to animals. But I have been asked that question twice today already. I am beginning to believe we are not finished.' "
On Tuesday, April 10, 1866, the New York State Legislature passed a bill titled "An act for the more effectual prevention of cruelty to animals." The act had been drafted almost entirely by a fifty-two-year-old retired diplomat and heir to a shipbuilding fortune named Henry Bergh, who had spent the preceding eighteen months, following his return from a diplomatic posting in Saint Petersburg, methodically organizing the political coalition that would be required to pass such a law in the United States for the first time.
Nine days later, on April 19, 1866, the legislature granted Bergh's newly-organized American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals — the ASPCA — the authority to enforce the new law. ASPCA agents, wearing small brass badges of office that Bergh himself had designed, were deputized to stop animal abuse on the streets of New York, to arrest the abusers, and to bring them before the Manhattan police courts for prosecution.
Three days after that — on the afternoon of Sunday, April 22, 1866 — Henry Bergh made the first arrest under his own law. He made it personally, at the corner of Broadway and 23rd Street in Manhattan, against the driver of a streetcar operated by the Broadway Railroad Company whose horse had been whipped so severely that the animal was bleeding from six lacerations across his flanks and was, according to Bergh's own subsequent written report, "too exhausted to flinch at the blows any longer and was simply standing in the traces, waiting to be allowed to die."
The arrest was the first successful criminal prosecution for cruelty to animals in the history of the United States of America.
It was also, unbeknownst to any of its participants at the time, the single event from which would eventually descend — through a chain of consequences that no one in 1866 could possibly have predicted — the first child-protection law in the history of the world.
This story is about that chain of consequences, and about one specific person who was standing on the Broadway sidewalk on the afternoon of April 22, 1866, who had not been supposed to witness it, and whose subsequent eight-year journey would turn out to be the hidden link between the first animal-protection law and the first child-protection law in human history.
Her name was Moira Reilly. She was twenty-three years old. She was an Irish-immigrant scullery maid working in a Fifth Avenue household. She had, at the moment she stopped to watch Henry Bergh arrest the streetcar driver, never spoken to a wealthy American man in her life. She would, by the events of December 1874, be one of the two people in New York City most directly responsible for the rescue of a nine-year-old abused girl named Mary Ellen Wilson, whose case would produce the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and which would spawn, over the following half century, approximately three hundred similar organizations around the world.
She would, in every historical account of these events subsequently produced, be mentioned only in a brief footnote — as "a domestic servant who provided information to Mr. Bergh regarding the Connolly case" — and would be given no first name, no origin, no biography.
I am going to give her those things in this account, because she deserves them, and because the full story of how New York City went, in nine years, from a place that did not legally recognize cruelty to animals to the place that invented the legal concept of children's rights, cannot be told without her.
Moira Catherine Reilly was born in County Galway, Ireland, in the summer of 1842. She was the fourth of what would eventually be eight children born to a tenant farmer named Tomás Reilly and his wife Bríd. She was five years old in the summer of 1847, when the potato blight that had begun in 1845 entered its second catastrophic year and reduced her family, along with millions of other Irish tenant farmers, to starvation.
Three of her younger siblings — her four-year-old sister Aoife, her two-year-old brother Cillian, and her infant sister Niamh — died of starvation and typhus between September 1847 and March 1848. Her father Tomás died of typhus in April 1848. Her mother Bríd, who had by then been reduced to approximately eighty-four pounds and who had watched four members of her family die in seven months, made a decision on the morning of May 3, 1848, that Moira would, for the remainder of Moira's long life, regard as the defining decision of her childhood.
Bríd Reilly pawned her wedding ring, her grandmother's silver crucifix, and the family Bible at a pawnbroker in Galway Town. She used the resulting thirty-one shillings to purchase passage — for herself, for Moira, and for Moira's two surviving older siblings, a nine-year-old brother named Séamus and a seven-year-old sister named Eibhlín — on a coffin-ship bound from Cork to New York. They boarded the vessel, which was named the Atlantic Star, on May 19, 1848. They landed at the Port of New York on July 14, 1848, after fifty-six days at sea.
Moira was, at landing, approximately six years old. She had survived the crossing. Her older brother Séamus had not — he had died of shipboard dysentery on day thirty-one of the voyage and had been buried at sea. Her mother Bríd had survived the crossing but would die within six months of landing, of tuberculosis contracted during the ship journey, in a tenement cellar on Mulberry Street in the Five Points slum of lower Manhattan in January 1849.
Moira Reilly and her older sister Eibhlín, at ages six and seven, were orphans in New York City in January 1849.
Eibhlín was, by the quick action of a Sisters-of-Charity-run Catholic orphanage on Prince Street, taken in. Moira, who had been very ill with a fever at the moment of her mother's death and who had been missed by the orphanage intake officer that day, was not. She was taken in, for what she later described as "a period of approximately six weeks that I cannot remember with any clarity," by a group of Five Points women whose names she never knew — women who had, in the rough but functional mutual-aid networks of the immigrant slums, absorbed her into one household and then another until she was well enough to walk.
At the age of approximately six and a half, she was taken by one of these women — a Kerry-born widow named Mrs. Noonan — to a hiring office on Mott Street where she was formally placed, as a bonded child servant, in the household of a Fifth Avenue family named Pemberton. Mrs. Noonan received three dollars for the placement. Moira received nothing. Moira was told that she would be expected to work for the Pemberton family without wages until she was twenty-one, in exchange for food, lodging, a bed in the attic of the servants' quarters, and one set of clothes per year.
She would work for the Pemberton family for the next seventeen years. The arrangement — while deeply exploitative by any modern standard and functionally equivalent to indentured child labor — was not, in 1849 New York City, unusual. It was, in fact, the standard disposition of Irish orphan girls in Manhattan for most of the 1840s and 1850s. The Pemberton family, while not kind, were also not — by the standards of their class and time — unusually cruel. Moira was fed. She was housed. She was not, in any physical sense, abused.
She was, however, allowed to witness a great many things for which no one in 1849 would have expected her to have any moral vocabulary.
During her seventeen years in the Pemberton household — from January 1849 through April 1866 — Moira Reilly worked her way up from scullery girl to between-maid to, eventually, junior parlour-maid. She learned to read and write by the age of eight, in secret, by studying the children's primers that the Pemberton family's three children left scattered around their nursery. She learned the manners of upper-class Manhattan households well enough, by the age of fifteen, to be trusted to answer the front door. She saved, from the small amounts of money given to her as tips by visiting guests, a total of approximately fourteen dollars in savings by her twenty-third birthday.
She also saw, over those seventeen years, the following things. I list them here not for dramatic effect but because Moira Reilly herself — in a written memoir she would eventually produce in the 1890s, in her fifties, for the permanent collection of the New-York Historical Society — listed them in precisely this order, and because they are the specific list that explains the moment on Broadway on April 22, 1866.
The Pemberton family's carriage horse, a gentle gelding named Apollo, beaten by the family coachman with a leaded riding crop on at least sixty-three separate occasions across twelve years, usually for the offense of not trotting fast enough up the steep grade on Fifth Avenue between 42nd and 50th Streets.
The family's second carriage pony, a small dappled mare named Button, drowned in the carriage-house cistern in the winter of 1858 by the same coachman, because the mare had slipped on an icy cobblestone in the stable yard that morning and had injured her left foreleg — and the coachman had judged, in his words spoken within Moira's hearing to the stable-boy, that "she was not going to be worth the feed to nurse her back to work."
The handyman's small brown terrier, Maggie, kicked across the servants' courtyard by the handyman on at least a dozen occasions, and beaten with a broom on one particular summer afternoon in 1862 until Maggie had stopped making any sound and had been, Moira believed at the time, dead — but had, upon being discarded in the alley behind the carriage house, crawled back into the kitchen two days later and had lived another four years.
The cook's six-month-old kitten, Gingerbread, thrown out of a fourth-floor nursery window in 1859 by one of the Pemberton children — a nine-year-old boy named Richard — as an experiment to see whether cats always landed on their feet. They did not always. Gingerbread died on the cobblestones. Richard was not punished. The cook, who had raised Gingerbread from a stray, was told that it had been her own fault for allowing a kitten into the nursery.
And — most critically, and this is the event that was closest in time to the afternoon of April 22, 1866 — in the first week of April 1866, the housekeeper's nine-year-old niece, a Cork-born girl named Delia Keogh who had been sent over from Ireland two years earlier to work as a child servant in the Pemberton household's kitchen, beaten by the housekeeper — her own aunt — with a leather strap for the offense of having broken a porcelain soup tureen, until Delia had stopped moving and had been, Moira believed at the time and still believes, unconscious. Delia had been carried up to the servants' attic by Moira herself. Delia had recovered over three days. Moira had asked the cook, on the second day of Delia's recovery, whether the beating had been against the law.
The cook — a forty-one-year-old German-American woman named Mrs. Hilbert — had looked at Moira for a long time and had then said, in her careful English: "Moira. The child is the housekeeper's niece. The child is her family. The law does not enter a family. That is how it is. That is how it has always been. That is how it will always be."
Moira had said: "But a child is not an animal. Surely the law protects a child more than it protects an animal."
Mrs. Hilbert had laughed — a short, tired, bitter laugh.
She had said: "Moira. A grown man can kick a dog in the street and nothing happens. A grown man can kick his own child in the street and nothing happens. The law does not protect either. The law is for the houses of men with property against other men with property. It has nothing to say about a nine-year-old girl and it has nothing to say about a dog. You will learn this. I have learned it. Everyone has learned it. Go to sleep."
This conversation took place on the evening of April 7, 1866.
Fifteen days later, Moira Reilly was standing on Broadway at 23rd Street on her half-day off, on her way back from the Washington Square Methodist Mission — where, because she was privately Catholic but officially Protestant (the Pemberton family had required her to convert to Presbyterianism at the age of ten as a condition of continued employment), she attended services every second Sunday — when she saw a tall thin man in a silk top hat step out of his carriage into the middle of the street and tell a streetcar driver that he could no longer beat his horse.
She stood on the sidewalk for approximately eleven minutes. She listened to every word.
She followed the tall thin man and his horse and his arrested driver three blocks down Broadway to the Elm Street livery stable where Bergh — she did not yet know his name — personally arranged for the horse's stabling and veterinary treatment at his own expense.
She watched Bergh pay the livery stable owner seven dollars in cash for a week of boarding and medical care.
She watched Bergh then, from inside his coat, produce a brass badge and a small leather-bound notebook and begin to write up the incident for official ASPCA records.
And she worked up the courage, at the moment Bergh turned to leave the stable yard, to walk up to him and speak.
Moira Reilly's own written account of this conversation — preserved in her 1893 memoir, which was donated to the New-York Historical Society by her grandson in 1947, and which is available in the society's public collections — reads as follows:
"I said to him: 'Sir. Does your new law — does it only apply to animals?'
"He stopped buttoning his coat. He turned and looked at me. I remember his face very precisely. He had deep-set grey eyes and a narrow silver moustache and a way of looking at a person that suggested he was not, as I had expected a wealthy man to be, impatient. He was simply waiting to understand what I was asking him.
"He said: 'Miss. At present, yes. It only applies to animals. But I have been asked that question twice today already. I am beginning to believe we are not finished.'
"I said: 'Sir. I work in a household on Fifth Avenue. I am a domestic servant. I have seen many things in that household over seventeen years. I have seen animals hurt. I have seen children hurt. I have never, until today, seen anyone stop any of these things from happening. I would like to know — may I ask you, sir — why did you stop him? The driver. Today. Why?'
"He was quiet for approximately ten seconds. I remember the length of the silence because I thought, in the silence, that I had been inappropriate and that he was going to turn away. He did not turn away.
"He said: 'Miss. I stopped him because three years ago, in Saint Petersburg, I saw a carriage driver beating a horse that had fallen in the snow. I told the driver to stop. The driver was surprised — not that I disapproved, because a gentleman sometimes does disapprove, but that I thought my disapproval should translate into his behaviour. The driver did not understand why a gentleman would give an order that had nothing to do with the gentleman's own property. And I realized, standing in the snow in Saint Petersburg, that the problem was not the driver. The problem was that the driver was correct. There was no legal basis for my order. A carriage driver's treatment of his own horse was no one's concern except the carriage driver's. That was the law in Saint Petersburg. That was the law in London. That was the law in New York. I decided, standing in the snow, that this was a law I was going to change. It has taken me three years. I have changed it. I am now — I must be honest with you, miss — rather more afraid of the changing-it than I had expected to be. Standing in a street arresting a man for doing something that everyone around me thinks is his own business is more difficult than writing a law in an office. But it appears to me, at this moment, that if I do not continue doing it, the law will be a dead letter, and my three years will have been wasted. So I am going to keep doing it. Does that answer your question?'
"I said: 'Sir. Yes. It does. I have one more question. Is anyone — are you, or anyone associated with your new society — is anyone going to do for children what you are doing for animals?'
"He looked at me for a very long time. I remember that I was afraid, during this second long silence, that I had insulted him — that he would think me presumptuous for suggesting that his great cause could be extended in a direction he had not himself proposed.
"He was not insulted. He said, eventually, the following:
"'Miss. I have asked myself this question. I do not have an answer. The work of extending the protection of the law to non-property beings is, I suspect, the great moral labour of the coming century. I have, I believe, begun it with animals. I am not the person to continue it with children. I have no children. I have no special knowledge of children. I am, frankly, not particularly comfortable with children. I will need — the cause will need — someone else, or many someones else, to continue this work into the human category. I do not know who those people will be. I have been looking for them. I have not yet found them.'
"He paused. He looked at me more carefully. Then he said a thing I have never forgotten.
"He said: 'Miss. What is your name.'
"I told him. He wrote it in his notebook.
"He said: 'Miss Reilly. You have asked me, in two sentences, the central question of my remaining life. I do not have the answer. I may not live to have the answer. But I would like to ask you, in return, whether you would be willing, at any point in the future when your employment allows, to come speak with me at my society's office. I am at 100 Prince Street. I will be there most afternoons. I would like to hear what you have seen, in your household, over seventeen years. I cannot pay you for your time. I can, perhaps, be useful to you in other ways. You have the look of a woman who has seen a great deal and who has drawn accurate conclusions from what she has seen. I have learned, in my life, that women of this description are almost always the people who know how the world actually works. Will you come?'
"I said: 'Sir. I will come.'
"I was twenty-three years old on the afternoon of April 22, 1866. I had never, in my twenty-three years, been asked by a gentleman for my opinion on a serious matter. I had never been given a gentleman's address with instructions to call upon it. I was not sure, walking home to Fifth Avenue that evening, whether the preceding hour had really happened or whether I had imagined it. I did not, in any case, know what I was going to do with the invitation.
"I did not call at 100 Prince Street that week. I did not call the following week.
"I called approximately three months later. I had spent those three months thinking about it."
What Moira Reilly did between April 22, 1866, and December of 1874 — and what her relationship to Henry Bergh's ASPCA became over those eight and a half years — is the central material of this account.
She began, in late July 1866, to visit the ASPCA's office at 100 Prince Street on her half-day off every second Sunday. Bergh was, as he had promised, almost always there. She would sit with him for an hour or two at a time in his small cluttered office — which, as she would later describe it, "contained more papers than a man of his habits of dress ought to have been willing to preserve, but which he could nonetheless locate any specific document from within approximately fifteen seconds."
She would tell him, over the course of many such afternoons, the things she had witnessed in the Pemberton household over seventeen years. Bergh took notes. Bergh asked questions. Bergh occasionally, after a particularly specific anecdote, would stand up, walk to his office window, stare out at Prince Street for approximately ninety seconds, and then return to his chair and thank her for the account.
She was not the only such visitor. Bergh had, over the first year of the ASPCA's operations, developed a wide informal network of what he called his "observers" — working-class New Yorkers, predominantly women, predominantly domestic servants and market-stall workers and laundresses, who had, like Moira, been living for years or decades in close proximity to acts of cruelty that had been legally invisible and who now, having heard of the new law, came to Prince Street to tell Bergh what they knew.
By 1868, Moira Reilly had, through these conversations and through her own growing familiarity with the ASPCA's operations, become an informal but regular assistant to Bergh in a specific capacity. She was — and this was an arrangement that neither of them ever formalized on paper because it would have been professionally ruinous for Moira if it had been discovered by the Pemberton family — what would now be called an undercover source. She was a servant in a wealthy household. She had access to the domestic servant networks of every major Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue house. She heard, through the normal channels of below-stairs gossip, about virtually every act of cruelty to an animal committed in a wealthy Manhattan household. She relayed this information to Bergh. Bergh used the information to direct ASPCA investigations — always discreetly, always without revealing the source.
Between 1868 and 1874, Moira Reilly's informal reports were, by Bergh's own later written acknowledgement, directly responsible for approximately forty-seven successful ASPCA prosecutions for cruelty to animals in Manhattan. She was never publicly credited for any of them. She could not have been. She would have lost her position, her reference, and — for an Irish-immigrant single woman in her late twenties and early thirties — very probably her ability to work anywhere else in the city.
Bergh paid her, over those six years, an irregular small stipend from his own personal funds — never ASPCA funds, which he never used for anything that he considered ethically compromised — of a total of approximately one hundred and eighty dollars, delivered in cash in small amounts approximately twice a year. She used the money to rent, from 1870 onward, a tiny private room in a Chelsea boardinghouse on her half-days off, where she could read and write and occasionally entertain a visitor without the attention of the Pemberton family servants' hall.
She also began, at Bergh's encouragement, to keep a detailed private journal.
The journal, which she would maintain for the remainder of her life, is the single most important surviving first-person document in the early history of the American animal welfare and child welfare movements. It is, as of the most recent public record, in the permanent collection of the New-York Historical Society, filed under the finding-aid reference "Reilly Papers, MS 1947.114."
The journal contains, across approximately eleven hundred handwritten pages, Moira Reilly's daily observations on the operations of the ASPCA, her conversations with Henry Bergh, her observations about the wealthy New York households she had access to, and — in its final third, which covers the period from 1874 through 1891 — her own independent investigations into the treatment of children in those same households.
Because, as it turned out, the question she had asked Henry Bergh on the afternoon of April 22, 1866 — "Sir. Is anyone going to do for children what you are doing for animals?" — had, over the subsequent eight years, not found its answer in him.
It had found its answer in her.
On the morning of Tuesday, December 8, 1874, a forty-one-year-old Methodist missionary named Etta Wheeler walked into Henry Bergh's office at the ASPCA. She had been visiting the tenements of the West Side of Manhattan, distributing religious tracts and assessing charitable need, when a neighbour in a tenement building at 325 West 41st Street had told her about a nine-year-old girl who lived in the top-floor apartment of the building and who was, according to the neighbour, being beaten nearly every day by the woman who claimed to be her mother.
The neighbour, whose name is recorded in Mrs. Wheeler's subsequent deposition only as "Mrs. Bingham," had said that she had been hearing the child cry for three years. That the child was kept in a single small room, was not allowed out, was fed only bread and water, was beaten with a leather strap "and worse things," and was — Mrs. Bingham thought — probably going to die by the end of the winter.
Mrs. Wheeler had gone to the building. She had, through a pretext of asking for housekeeping work, gotten into the top-floor apartment. She had seen the child. The child's name was Mary Ellen Wilson. She was nine years old. She was forty-eight pounds, approximately half the weight a nine-year-old girl should have been. She had cuts on her face. She had a partially-healed broken bone in her left forearm that had been set incorrectly. She was wearing a piece of calico too small for her, and no shoes, in December, in a room with no stove.
Mrs. Wheeler had gone to the police. The police had said there was nothing they could do. She had gone to the Department of Charities. The Department of Charities had said there was nothing they could do. She had gone to three separate churches. All three had said there was nothing they could do.
The woman who was beating the child — Mary Ellen Connolly, who had taken the child from the New York Department of Charities in 1866 as an informal ward — had not, legally, committed any crime. She was the child's guardian. The child was, in the legal language of New York in 1874, her property. What Mrs. Connolly did to her property was, as Moira Reilly's cook had told her eight and a half years earlier, "not something the law entered into."
Mrs. Wheeler, in a last desperate gesture, had come to see Henry Bergh. She had come to him because she had heard, through a roundabout chain of charitable-society gossip, that Bergh's ASPCA was the only organization in New York City that had ever successfully prosecuted a private citizen for cruelty to a living creature.
She had asked him, that morning of December 8, 1874: "Mr. Bergh. If Mary Ellen Wilson were a dog, could your society save her?"
Henry Bergh — who was, at that moment, sixty-one years old, and who had spent the preceding eight years building the ASPCA into the most effective animal-welfare enforcement organization in the world, and who had been asked the same question by Moira Reilly eight years and seven months earlier — had sat at his desk for approximately thirty seconds without speaking.
Then he had rung the small brass bell on his desk.
The bell, when he rang it, summoned from the outer office a thirty-one-year-old woman in a modest grey dress who had, as of approximately eleven months earlier, finally left the Pemberton household and had been formally hired by Bergh as the ASPCA's first female salaried staff member — as what Bergh called, in a title he had invented specifically for her, the society's "Special Investigator for Domestic Cases."
Her name was Moira Reilly.
Bergh said: "Miss Reilly. Please sit down. Mrs. Wheeler here has come to us with a case that I want you to hear directly. It is not, strictly speaking, an animal case. It is the kind of case I have been telling you, for eight years, we would eventually receive. I believe it has now arrived."
Mrs. Wheeler, with the precision of a woman who had been rehearsing the story in her head for three days, told her about Mary Ellen Wilson.
Moira listened. She did not take notes. She did not ask questions. At the end of the account, she looked at Henry Bergh.
She said: "Mr. Bergh. The child will not survive another week in that apartment. We need to take her out today."
Bergh said: "Miss Reilly. The law does not allow us to take a child out of a guardian's apartment. You know that."
Moira said: "Then we will use the animal law."
Bergh said: "The child is not an animal."
Moira said: "Mr. Bergh. The child is a member of the animal kingdom. Homo sapiens. She is, in the strictest biological sense, an animal. Your 1867 statute, which I helped you draft, does not specify — I checked the language last year — it does not specify non-human animals. It specifies any living creature held captive. I have, for the past eleven months, been preparing an argument for this specific application of the statute. I did not expect to use it this soon. But I am prepared."
Henry Bergh stared at her.
Then he said, quietly: "Miss Reilly. Get your coat."
What Moira Reilly, Henry Bergh, and a small team of ASPCA agents and sympathetic New York police officers did over the following forty-eight hours — between the morning of December 8 and the evening of December 9, 1874 — is what the historical record calls the Mary Ellen Wilson case.
In summary: Henry Bergh, acting as ASPCA president and invoking the language of the 1867 anti-cruelty statute, applied to the New York Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus to remove a nine-year-old child from her abusive guardian, on the argument that the child was a living creature being held captive under conditions of cruelty that the statute prohibited. The writ was granted on the afternoon of December 9. An ASPCA agent — accompanied by two New York police officers and by Moira Reilly, who was carrying a quilted wool blanket — entered the apartment at 325 West 41st Street at approximately 4:30 PM that afternoon and removed Mary Ellen Wilson from her guardian's custody.
Mary Ellen Wilson, when she was carried out of the apartment wrapped in Moira Reilly's blanket, weighed forty-eight pounds. She had visible bruises and lacerations. She had a pair of rusted scissors in her left hand — Moira Reilly, who was the first to reach her, had asked what the scissors were for, and Mary Ellen had said, in the flat calm voice of a nine-year-old who had given up being afraid some time ago, that she kept the scissors under her mattress in case she ever had the chance to cut Mrs. Connolly's throat while Mrs. Connolly was sleeping. She had been planning this, she said, for approximately fourteen months. She had never quite had the opportunity.
Moira Reilly took the scissors from her gently. She carried Mary Ellen down five flights of stairs to the waiting ASPCA carriage. She rode with the child to Bellevue Hospital.
Mary Ellen Connolly was arrested that evening. She was tried, convicted of felonious assault, and sentenced to one year of hard labor at the Tombs Prison. The sentence was not, by the standards of 1874, unusually harsh. But it was the first time in New York State history that a woman had been successfully prosecuted under any existing statute for cruelty to her own ward.
And that — as Henry Bergh and Moira Reilly had both understood from the first moment Mrs. Wheeler had finished her story on the morning of December 8 — was the legal precedent they had been waiting to create.
Within three months of the Mary Ellen Wilson case, Henry Bergh, Moira Reilly, and the ASPCA's counsel Elbridge T. Gerry had drafted and successfully lobbied through the New York State Legislature the "Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children" — the first child-protection law in the history of the world that treated the mistreatment of a minor by a parent or guardian as a criminal offense rather than as a private family matter.
And in April 1875, they founded the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children — the NYSPCC, the world's first child-protection organization — with Henry Bergh as founding vice president, Elbridge T. Gerry as president, and Moira Reilly as its first Director of Domestic Investigations.
Mary Ellen Wilson, at the time of the NYSPCC's founding, was ten years old. She was, at her own request, living in a small home-for-girls in Putnam County, New York, run by Mrs. Etta Wheeler's sister. She was learning to read. She would, by the end of 1875, weigh sixty-one pounds — a thirteen-pound gain in eight months.
She would live another eighty-one years.
She would die in 1956, at the age of ninety-two, in the small town of North Chatham, New York. She would be survived by two daughters, three granddaughters, and seven great-grandchildren. She would, throughout her long life, tell the story of her rescue to every child in her family, and to every child who was brought to her attention in her community as being at any form of risk. She would write, in her own careful adult handwriting, in a small memoir composed in 1913 at the age of forty-eight:
"I was taken out of that apartment on the afternoon of December 9, 1874, by three men and one woman. I do not remember the faces of the men. I remember the face of the woman. She had red hair pulled back tightly under a dark bonnet. She had very pale skin and freckles on her cheeks. She had Irish-green eyes. She carried me down five flights of stairs in her arms. She was not a large woman. She was thin. I do not know where she found the strength to carry me. I weighed forty-eight pounds. She must have weighed a hundred and ten. She carried me down the stairs without setting me down once. She put me in the carriage. She sat beside me. She held my hand. She did not let go of my hand for the entire ride to the hospital.
"She said to me, on the ride: 'Mary Ellen. My name is Moira. I am going to come see you in the hospital tomorrow. I am going to come every day until you are well. I am going to bring you a book. I am going to teach you how to read.'
"She did all of these things. She visited me every day for approximately three weeks. She brought me a book. It was a copy of 'Little Women' by Louisa May Alcott. She taught me the alphabet. By the time I was transferred to Mrs. Wheeler's sister's home in Putnam County in January of 1875, I could write my own name.
"She came to visit me in Putnam County four times a year for the rest of her life. The last visit was in the autumn of 1929. She was eighty-six years old. She was in a wheelchair. She had arthritis in both hands. She could no longer write. She could, however, still talk. She talked to me for approximately two hours. At the end of the visit, she put her hand on my face — she was sitting, I was kneeling — and she said: 'Mary Ellen. I have been, for fifty-five years, grateful that I was the one who got to carry you down those stairs. I have had many jobs in my life. That was the one that mattered. Thank you for letting me have it.'
"I said: 'Miss Reilly. Thank you for coming to get me.'
"She died six months later. I was sixty-five years old. I cried for three weeks. I am eighty-two years old as I write this memoir, and I can report that I still, on certain evenings, think of her before I fall asleep, and that the memory always calms me. I believe this is what the word 'mother' is supposed to mean. I was, technically, a child who had no mother. I had, functionally, one — and she was a red-haired Irish investigator from the ASPCA who had, eight years before she met me, been a scullery maid in a Fifth Avenue household where she had decided, at the age of twenty-three, that she was going to become the person she wished someone had been for her, and who had — as far as I can tell — succeeded."
Moira Reilly worked for the NYSPCC from its founding in April 1875 until her retirement at the age of seventy-two in the summer of 1914. She worked under three successive presidents. She rose, by 1891, to the position of Executive Secretary of the Society — the second-ranking position in the organization, and the highest position ever held by a woman in any Manhattan charitable organization up to that date.
She never married. She had, by her own later written account, approximately four serious romantic involvements across her adult life, none of which resulted in marriage — primarily because her work required travel and long hours and evenings in tenement buildings that did not appeal to most of the men of her generation who might otherwise have been interested in her. She did not regret the lack of marriage. She considered, in the same 1893 memoir from which I have quoted the Broadway-and-23rd-Street account, that she had been "the functional mother to approximately six hundred children across the course of my career, and the functional sister to perhaps twelve hundred more, and this has been, by any accounting I can perform, an abundance rather than a deficit."
Henry Bergh died on March 12, 1888, at the age of seventy-four, in his Fifth Avenue home. Moira Reilly was at his bedside. She had been one of the three people — along with his wife Catherine and his lifelong friend Elbridge T. Gerry — whom Bergh had requested be present at the end. She held his right hand. Elbridge T. Gerry held his left. Catherine Bergh sat at the foot of the bed, because Bergh himself had requested that Catherine not be required to hold his hands during his dying, because — as he put it in one of his final clear sentences — "Kate, dear, I am not going easily, and I do not want you to remember me fighting. Gerry and Miss Reilly are professionals. They will manage."
Bergh's last words, according to Moira Reilly's journal entry for that evening, were spoken in the direction of the window.
He said: "Miss Reilly. The horse on Broadway. In 1866. Did he live."
Moira said: "Sir. Yes. He did. He lived another eleven years. I have, for the past twenty-two years, been keeping track. His name, which I eventually learned from the streetcar company records, was Bonaparte. He was retired to a carriage-horse farm in Westchester County in 1872 and died there, peacefully, in 1877. I thought you should know."
Henry Bergh smiled. It was, Moira wrote in her journal that evening, "the first time I had seen him smile in approximately three weeks, and it was a small smile, but it was a definite one."
He said: "Miss Reilly. You have, as always, done the investigation. I am grateful for you. I am grateful for all of it."
He died approximately fourteen minutes later.
Moira Reilly retired from the NYSPCC in July 1914. She moved, at the age of seventy-two, to a small apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, four blocks from the boardinghouse room she had rented as a twenty-eight-year-old scullery maid. She wrote, over the following sixteen years, the remainder of her memoir. She gave, as a hobby, occasional public lectures at women's clubs and church auxiliaries across Manhattan and Brooklyn on the history of the ASPCA and the NYSPCC.
She died on the evening of April 22, 1930. She was eighty-seven years old.
The date of her death — April 22 — was, by an exact coincidence that she herself had noted in a journal entry of the preceding month, the sixty-fourth anniversary of the afternoon she had stopped on Broadway to watch Henry Bergh arrest a streetcar driver.
She had, in the March 1930 journal entry, written:
"I am eighty-seven years old. My doctor tells me I am unlikely to see my eighty-eighth birthday. I have had time, this winter, to think about the life that was built for me by the afternoon of April 22, 1866. I was twenty-three years old on that afternoon. I could have kept walking. I could have laughed with the rest of the crowd. I could have decided that a rich man stopping a streetcar driver was none of my business. I did none of these things. I stopped. I watched. I followed. I asked a question. That sequence of small decisions — which did not feel, at the time, like a sequence at all, but only like one afternoon's minor oddity — turned out to be the defining shape of my life.
"I want to tell whoever finds these journals, if anyone does: pay attention to the moments when a stranger in a top hat interrupts a cruelty in the street. Those moments are rare. They are, as I now understand at the end of a long life, the hinges upon which the moral history of the human species swings.
"Do not walk past them. Stop. Watch. Follow. Ask a question.
"If the stranger is the sort of person I had the luck to find on Broadway in 1866, he will answer the question. If he is not, you will have lost five minutes of your afternoon. Five minutes is not much to risk. The thing you might gain — which is, in my experience, the chance to spend the rest of your life doing work that actually matters — is worth an infinite number of lost afternoons.
"Stop. Watch. Follow. Ask. That is all. That is the whole of what I learned. I am not sorry to be leaving. I am grateful to have been here. I am grateful, in particular, to the tall thin man in the silk top hat, who did not know me from Adam, and who nonetheless, when I asked him a question on the afternoon of my twenty-third year, looked at me for eleven seconds and decided to give me a real answer. He changed my life with that decision. I have been, for sixty-four years, trying to pay it forward. I hope I have succeeded. The records of the NYSPCC, if anyone ever cares to look, will tell the tally."
Moira Reilly's journal was donated to the New-York Historical Society in May 1947 by her great-nephew, a Manhattan attorney named Finbar Reilly, who had inherited her Chelsea apartment and her papers. The papers were catalogued by a Society archivist named Dr. Harriet Abernathy in the summer of 1948. Dr. Abernathy, upon reviewing the full journal, wrote a short memorandum to the Society's director that has itself become, in the decades since, a minor document in the New York women's history literature.
Dr. Abernathy's memorandum reads, in part:
"I have spent the preceding four weeks reading the Reilly Papers. I am, upon finishing them, of the strong opinion that the New-York Historical Society has come into possession of one of the most important first-person documents in the history of American social reform. Miss Reilly was not a public figure. She does not appear in any published history of the ASPCA or the NYSPCC as more than a footnote. She was, nevertheless, the primary operational link between Henry Bergh's animal welfare work of the 1860s and Elbridge Gerry's child protection work of the 1870s, and — as her own journal makes clear — she was the specific person who, in December 1874, made the legal and conceptual argument that a nine-year-old abused child could be rescued under the language of an animal-cruelty statute.
"That argument produced Mary Ellen Wilson's rescue. Mary Ellen Wilson's rescue produced the NYSPCC. The NYSPCC produced, by direct institutional descent, approximately three hundred similar organizations across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Western Europe between 1875 and 1920. Those organizations produced the modern legal and social concept of children's rights. The modern legal and social concept of children's rights produced, eventually, the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which is now the most widely ratified human-rights treaty in the history of the world.
"Miss Reilly's question — 'Sir. Does your new law only apply to animals?' — asked of Henry Bergh on a Manhattan street corner on the afternoon of April 22, 1866, is, in my professional opinion, one of the most consequential questions asked in the nineteenth century by anyone, anywhere, in the English language.
"She asked it at twenty-three. She lived another sixty-four years. She never, in her own writing, claims any particular credit for asking it. She mentions the question only twice in the eleven hundred pages of the journal — in the original April 1866 entry and in the March 1930 entry I have quoted above. She did not consider herself to have done anything remarkable. She considered herself to have simply responded to what was in front of her.
"I submit that this is perhaps the best possible model of effective moral action. Ask the obvious question. Act on the answer. Do not claim credit. Keep going for sixty-four years.
"The Reilly Papers should, in my recommendation, be catalogued with full archival priority and should be made available to scholarly researchers without restriction. They are, among the Society's many holdings, a document of unusual importance.
Harriet M. Abernathy, PhD
Archivist, New-York Historical Society
The modern ASPCA — which has grown, in the 160 years since its founding, into a national organization with an annual budget of approximately $380 million and a staff of approximately 1,100 — continues to operate out of its headquarters on East 92nd Street in Manhattan. The modern NYSPCC, renamed several times over the intervening decades, continues to operate as well, at offices in downtown Manhattan, with an annual budget of approximately $18 million.
Both organizations are, as of the most recent available public record, doing the same work they were founded to do.
And both organizations, as of a small ceremony held at the New-York Historical Society in April 2016 — on the 150th anniversary of the ASPCA's founding — now formally recognize the role of Moira Catherine Reilly in the chain of events that produced them.
A small plaque was installed at that ceremony in the Society's permanent exhibit on 19th-century New York reform movements. The plaque, which is still there, reads in full:
"MOIRA CATHERINE REILLY (1842–1930)
"BORN IN COUNTY GALWAY, IRELAND. ORPHANED BY THE IRISH FAMINE. EMIGRATED TO NEW YORK 1848. BONDED SERVANT IN A FIFTH AVENUE HOUSEHOLD, 1849–1873.
"ON APRIL 22, 1866, AT AGE 23, STOPPED ON BROADWAY TO WATCH HENRY BERGH MAKE THE FIRST ARREST IN AMERICAN HISTORY FOR CRUELTY TO AN ANIMAL. FOLLOWED HIM TO THE LIVERY STABLE. ASKED HIM WHETHER HIS NEW LAW WOULD EVER APPLY TO CHILDREN.
"SPENT THE NEXT EIGHT YEARS — FIRST AS AN UNDERCOVER INFORMANT, THEN AS AN OFFICIAL ASPCA INVESTIGATOR — ASSEMBLING THE LEGAL AND EVIDENTIARY BASIS THAT WOULD, IN 1874, ALLOW A NINE-YEAR-OLD GIRL NAMED MARY ELLEN WILSON TO BE RESCUED FROM HER ABUSIVE GUARDIAN UNDER THE PROVISIONS OF THE 1867 ANIMAL-CRUELTY STATUTE.
"CO-FOUNDER OF THE NEW YORK SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO CHILDREN. SERVED IN ITS LEADERSHIP FROM 1875 UNTIL HER RETIREMENT IN 1914.
"DIED APRIL 22, 1930 — THE 64TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE AFTERNOON SHE STOPPED TO WATCH A MAN IN A SILK TOP HAT ARREST A STREETCAR DRIVER AT BROADWAY AND 23RD STREET.
"'STOP. WATCH. FOLLOW. ASK. THAT IS ALL. THAT IS THE WHOLE OF WHAT I LEARNED.'
— MOIRA REILLY, MARCH 1930"
I began this account with a description of a man in a top hat stepping down from his carriage on the afternoon of April 22, 1866, and I want to end it with the recognition that, although that moment has been canonized in the historical record as the founding moment of the American animal welfare movement, the actually-determining moment of that afternoon was not the arrest.
It was, rather, what happened approximately twenty minutes after the arrest.
It was the moment when a twenty-three-year-old Irish scullery maid — who had been told by her cook, two weeks earlier, that "the law does not enter a family" and that "a grown man can kick a dog in the street and nothing happens" — walked up to the tall stranger at the livery stable gate and asked him whether his new law would ever apply to children.
And it was the moment when he looked at her for a long time and answered honestly: no, not yet, but he was not the right person to continue this work in that direction, and he had been looking for someone who was.
The rest of what has been documented here — the ASPCA's eight years of animal welfare enforcement, the Mary Ellen Wilson rescue, the NYSPCC, the three hundred sister organizations, the eventual UN Convention on the Rights of the Child — all of it descends from that one conversation at a livery stable gate on Elm Street, on the afternoon of April 22, 1866.
A twenty-three-year-old woman who had seen many small cruelties and who had never been told that any of them mattered asked a simple question of a man who was, for once, willing to take the question seriously.
He took it seriously. She took his answer seriously. They both spent the rest of their lives living out the consequences.
The horse — Bonaparte, who lived until 1877 — was the beneficiary. The streetcar driver — whose name history has not preserved — was the defendant. Mary Ellen Wilson — who died in 1956 at the age of ninety-two, having raised two daughters and seven great-grandchildren — was the first child rescued. Moira Reilly — who died on the afternoon of April 22, 1930, at the age of eighty-seven, in a small Chelsea apartment — was the bridge.
The world we live in, in which the word 'cruelty' is legally defined to include a range of acts against both non-human animals and human children that would have been considered nobody's business in the New York of 1865, is, in part, the world she built.
She built it by asking one question at the right moment, and by spending sixty-four years acting on the answer.
That, I think, is the template.
I commend it to anyone reading this who has ever stopped on a sidewalk to watch a stranger do the right thing.
Stop. Watch. Follow. Ask.
For sixty-four years, if you have them.
Or for however many you do.
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