employed at work of this kind seems to have been regarded without any misgivings, both in Boston and at Haverhill, where he thinks the system more "ingenious.” 35 Instances might be multiplied of the employment of children in these early “manufactories." An establishment in Bethlehem, Conn., advertises for boys and girls from the age of ten to fourteen ;36 and another in the same state "having made and making additions to the factory" wanted “a number of lively boys from eight to eighteen." 37 In the Globe "Mills" of Philadelphia at this time, the labor was chiefly performed by boys. 38 The card "manufactory" in Boston was a subject for congratulation because it employed "not less than twelve hundred persons, chiefly women and children.' 39 The account of a Philadelphia factory calls attention to the fact that "satisfactory testimonials have been adduced of the good behavior of the women and children." 40

With the introduction of machinery and the opening up of new and great possibilities for manufacturing industries, the employment of children became more and more profitable and we find that their labor is always counted on as a valuable resource with which to meet the deficiency and high cost of male labor in this country. In the first mills in which machinery was used, children's labor was depended on. In 1789 a petition in behalf of the "first cotton factory," that of Beverly, Massachusetts, states that "it will afford employment to a great number of women and children, many of whom will be otherwise useless, if not burdensome to society." 41 In Rhode Island, Samuel Slater, the "father of American Manufactures," employed only

Bagnall, op. cit., p. 115. He records on the same trip his interest in a Haverhill factory. There, he explains, "one small person turns a wheel which employs eight spinners . . . . whereas at the Boston manufactory of this article each spinner has a small girl to turn the wheel" (Bagnall, op. cit., p. 118).

" Ibid., p. 197.

Collections Massachusetts Historical Society, III, 279. It is said, "This is a very valuable manufacture not only as it employs women and children, but also a great number of others." Many of these were, obviously, employed at home, not in the factory.

Bagnall, op. cit., p. 355.

"Bagnall, op. cit., p. 91.

children in his first small establishment. Smith Wilkinson's account of this mill, which was published many years later, describes all of the operatives as being between seven and twelve years of age. "I was then," he says, "in my tenth year and went to work for him tending the breaker." 42

When the new government began to consider seriously the possible means of developing our "infant industries," we find Hamilton calling attention in his "Report on Manufactures" to the fact that "children are rendered more useful by manufacturing establishments than they otherwise would be," 43 and Trench Coxe argues that women and children with the newly discovered power machinery will do the work and meet the demand for factory labor.44 It was indeed one of the arguments with which the early protectionists most frequently met their opponents in the first quarter of the last century. The objection that American labor was most profitably employed in agriculture and that to "abstract" this labor from the soil would be unwise and unprofitable, was answered by pointing to the children. In the pages of Niles' Register this is done again and again. The work of manufactures does not demand ablebodied men, it is claimed, but "is now better done by little girls from six to twelve years old.” 45

One hoary old protectionist in the pages of the same journal carefully works out the exact gain that comes to a typical village from the employing of its children in textile factories.

He

42 See Bagnall, Samuel Slater and The Early Development of the Cotton Manufacture, pp. 44, 45; and see the time list in G. S. White, Memoir of Samuel Slater, p. 99.

43 A. S. P. Finance, I, 84.

4 Coxe, View of the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1794), pp. 55, 301.

45 Niles' Register, XII, 226, 227. In this case the writer says further, "We here allude to the manufacture of articles of clothing with a reference to facts that cannot be questioned. Messrs. Rob't and Alexander M'Kim have a cotton mill in Baltimore . . . . in the which establishment they employ but two or three men; all the rest, in number about one hundred, are girls from six to twelve or thirteen years of age, and a few women, who without this employ would earn nothing at all. Mr. A. M'Kim . . . . informs me that many of his little work people read and write handsomely!"

comes to the conclusion that "if we suppose that before the establishment of these manufactories, there were two hundred children between seven and sixteen years of age, that contributed nothing towards their maintenance and that they are now employed, it makes an immediate difference of $13,500 a year to the value produced in the town!" 46

Philanthropists like Matthew Carey follow in the wake of colonial traditions which made industry a fetich, and are warm with their praise of manufactures because of the larger field of employment furnished for children. They point to the additional value that can be got from girls between the ages of ten and sixteen, (604,912 being their estimated number) "most of whom are too young or too delicate for agriculture," 47 and in contrast call attention to the "vice and immorality to which children are exposed by a career of idleness." Indeed the approval of child labor is met with on all sides. Commendation was solicited for Baxter's machines on the ground that they could be turned, one sort by children from five to ten years and the other by girls from ten to twenty years.48 Governor Davis of Massachusetts calls attention in one of his messages to the fact that not only the machines in the textile manufacture but "thousands of others equally important, are managed and worked easily by females and children." 49

It is true that the absolute number of children employed in our early mills was not appalling, but the absolute number of all employees in our manufacturing industries was small. It seems clear, however, that children formed a very large proportion of the total number of employees and that the utilization of children's labor was commended almost with unanimity. Such

Niles' Register, XI, 86. Children under seven are carefully excluded from the computation on the ground that, at this age, they are "incapable of any employment other than the little services they can render in domestic affairs!" "Matthew Carey, Essays in Pol. Econ., p. 460.

4 Niles' Register, VI, p. 16. It is claimed as a great advantage that the carding, roving, and spinning machines are separate and distinct machines; "the first [carding] worked by a girl or woman and fed by a child; the second [roving] worked by a child, the third worked by a child or girl."

4 Massachusetts House Document, 1835, (No. 3).

51

protests as one meets come for the most part from foreigners. A French traveler before the close of the eighteenth century writes that he finds "manufactures are much boasted of because children are employed therein from their most tender age." 50 An English woman in 1829 addressed an American audience in terms of reproach: "In your manufacturing districts you have children worked for twelve hours a day and . . . . you will soon have them as in England, worked to death. Now and then a free-trader comes in with a word of opposition. Condy Raguet, finding it hard to deny that manufactures make it possible to get large profits out of children's labor, fell back upon the argument that farm work was better for both boys and girls than factory work, and that girls were more likely to become good wives if they worked in kitchens instead of factories.52

An American manufacturer called as a witness before the English Factory Commission, was asked, "Have any complaints been made in the United States as to the propriety of such extent of labour for children?"53 His reply was, "There have been newspaper complaints originating probably from the workmen who came from this country to the United States, but among our workmen there is no desire to have the hours of labor shortened, since they see that it will necessarily be accompanied by a reduction of wages. "54

50 Brissot de Warville, New Travels in U. S. A., II, p. 126. He adds "that is to say, that men congratulate themselves upon making early martyrs of these innocent creatures, for is it not a torment to these poor little beings. . . . to be a whole day and almost every day of their lives employed at the same work, in an obscure and infected prison?"

p. 13.

51 Frances Wright, Lecture on Existing Evils (pamphlet, N. Y., 1829),

52 Free Trade Advocate (Philadelphia, 1829), Vol. I, p. 4.

53 He had pointed out that no difference was made on account of age, ("We have a great many between nine and twelve") and that children as well as adults worked from ten to fourteen hours according to the season. Testimony of James Kempson, First Report of Factories Inquiry Commission (1833), E, p. 21.

"Ibid., p. 21.

Unfortunately there are no available statistics showing the extent of child labor in the first half of the nineteenth century. From time to time, however, estimates are recorded which, in the absence of accurate data, are of considerable interest. Gallatin estimated in his Report on Manufactures that our cotton mills in 1811 would employ 500 men and 3,500 women,55 but the proportion of women to children and the ages of the children are not given. The Committee on Manufactures in 1816 reports vaguely 24,000 "boys under seventeen" and 66,000 "women and girls" out of an estimated 100,000 cotton mill employees.56 John Quincy Adams in his Digest of Manufactures gives statistics57 which show that in the various manufactures of cotton more than 50 per cent. of the total number of persons employed are children, but again the age limit for "children" is not given and the Digest itself was considered unreliable for many reasons. There are other estimates for the first quarter of the century for individual towns and mills, but all alike give only the classification "women and children" or "girls and boys," and although they uniformly show an extremely small percentage of men employed, they do not answer the question, How many children were at work and of what age were they? 58 Now and then an interesting document is found which seems to throw more light on prevailing conditions than such statistics as we have. The following extract from a memorandum book59 of an early manufacturer under date of January 27, 1815, is of interest from this point of view:

Dennis Rier of Newbury Port has this day engaged to come with his family to work in our factory on the following conditions. He is to be here about the 20th of next month and is to have the following wages per week:

American State Papers. Finance, II, 427. Similarly Trench Coxe in 1814 estimated that in seven-eighths of the labor necessary to produce fifty million pounds of yarn might be that of women and children (ibid., p. 669).

Ibid., III, p. 82.

Ibid., IV, pp. 28 ff.

65 In an article dealing with the employment of women, in the Journal of Political Economy, Vol. XIV, p. 482, I have collected some of these estimates. "From the Poignaud and Plant Papers a manuscript collection preserved in the Lancaster (Mass.) Town Library.