Moreover the employment of children varied not only from state to state but from district to district. Child labor was much less extensive in Massachusetts than in Rhode Island. Samuel Slater had established in Providence and its vicinity the plan of employing families in his mills-a transplanting of the system with which he had been familiar in England. The factory village of the Rhode Island type, therefore, was composed of families entirely dependent upon their labor in the mills, and the mill children lived at home with their parents. On the other hand, in towns like Lowell and Waltham in Massachusetts,60 the operatives were almost entirely farmers' daughters, who, being away from their own homes, were cared for in corporation boarding-houses. The result was, that since the cost of their board was more than a child could earn, the employment of children was not profitable.61 Kirk Boott's estimate for Lowell in 1827 was that, in six mills employing 1,200 persons, nine-tenths of the operatives were females and only twenty were from twelve to fourteen years of age. But that children were often employed very young, even in so-called model places like Waltham and Lowell, cannot be questioned. Mrs. Robinson, who gives us a delightful if somewhat optimistic

60 Hon. H. R. Oliver, Mass. Senate Doc. 21 (1868), points out that the "English or family system" of hiring whole families was not so desirable as the Lowell system of hiring individual operatives (pp. 24, 25).

61 Batchelder, Introduction and Early Progress of The Cotton Manufacture in the U. S. (Boston, 1863), pp. 74, 75.

account of the early mill girls, was only ten years old when she went to work in the Tremont Mills,62 and Lucy Larcom was only eleven when she became a little doffer on the Lawrence Corporation.63

66

The New Hampshire factories were more like those of Eastern Massachusetts,64 but Connecticut65 and the southern and western parts of Massachusetts were more like Rhode Island, where the tendency was all along toward the "family system."

62 Robinson, Loom and Spindle, chap. ii, "Child Life in the Lowell Mills," pp. 25-39.

Larcom, A New England Girlhood, pp. 153, 154.

See the account in White's Slater, p. 134, of a New Hampshire factory which employed 250 girls, five boys, and twenty overseers; nine of the girls were under fifteen, six of the girls and three of the boys under fourteen; the comment is, "the relative number of children employed in this establishment, it is believed, will correspond without much variation with the proportion to be found in most of the factories east of Providence and its vicinity; in the latter district, the manufactories were established at an earlier period, and still give employment to a large proportion of children."

65 Smith Wilkinson's letter from Pomfret, Conn., (Documents Relative to the Manufactures of the United States, 1832, I, p. 1046) contains an interesting statement regarding Connecticut : "We usually hire poor families from the farming business of from four to six children, and from a knowledge of their former income, being only the labor of the man, say $180-$200, the wages of the family is usually increased by the addition of the children to from $450-$600."

The extract from the Poignaud and Plant Papers, quoted supra is an illustration of this. And the situation in Fall River was described by the superintendent of public schools as follows: "The operatives are for the most part families, and do the work in the mills by the piece, taking in their children to assist..... The families are large . . . . and the mill owners are not willing to fill up their houses with families averaging perhaps ten members and get no more than two of all the number in the mill. The families are also, in most instances, so poor that the town would have to aid them, if the children were taken from their work. I do not think the English system of family help is found in other places to any great extent. It gives a great number of children, compared with the whole number of operatives, and their labor could not be dispensed with in the mills nor could we accommodate them in our schools." Mass. Senate Doc. 21 (1868), p. 46. By 1875 (Mass. Senate Doc. 50, p. 27) it was clearly stated that "men with growing families" is the standard demand in many of our manufacturing centers.

... .

Smith Wilkinson writes from Pomfret, Connecticut,

"In collecting our help, we are obliged to employ poor families, and generally those having the greatest number of children;" and the company's real estate investments are explained as an attempt "to give the men employment on the lands while the children are employed in factory.'

But Connecticut's point of view with regard to Rhode Island was distinctly Pharisaical, and a Connecticut official in 1842 gave the following account of the situation:

The English factory system was introduced into Rhode Island by Slater, and along with it, many of the evils of that system as it was before a more enlightened public opinion and beneficial legislation had improved it.

is a much larger proportion of children among the factory laborers in Rhode Island than in Connecticut or Massachusetts.

The contrast between Rhode Island and the other cotton manufacturing states in respect to child labor is made clear by the table accompanying the "Report on Cotton" at the Convention of the Friends of Industry in 1831. The total number of children under twelve employed in cotton factories in 1831 was 4,691 (excluding printeries which employed 430 more). Of this number 3,472 were from Rhode Island, 484 from New York, 439 from Connecticut, 217 from New Jersey, 60 from New Hampshire, 19 from Vermont and none from Massachusetts, 69

The Committee on Education of the Massachusetts Senate reported in 1825 that there was no necessity for legislative interference on the subject, and concluded that "this is a subject always deserving the parental care of a vigilant government. It appears, however, that the time of employment is generally

67 White's Memoir of Slater (Philadelphia, 1836), p. 127.

es Pamphlet on Legal Provision Respecting the Education and Employment of Children in Factories, etc. (Hartford, 1842).

69 "Report of the Committee on Cotton," Proceedings of the Friends of Domestic Industry at New York (Baltimore, 1831), p. II2. These figures are clearly the result of an underestimate taken from special reports by employers, who, then as now, were not over anxious to report the employment of young children. It is shown, e. g., in "Documents Relating to Manufactures" (1831) op. cit., II, 59, that 323 boys twelve to sixteen, and 406 under twelve were employed in New York; i. e., nearly as many boys under twelve according to this report as children under twelve according to the above report.

twelve or thirteen hours each day, excepting the Sabbath." 70 But a report from the House Committee on Education from the same state in 1836 is of considerable length and of a somewhat different tenor, as the following extracts sufficiently indicate: According to an estimate made by an intelligent friend of manufactories there were employed in 1830, in the various manufacturing establishments in the United States, no less than 200,000 females. If the number has increased in other parts of the country since the estimate was made, as it has in this state, it must at the present time amount to more than half a million! These are females alone, and most of them of young and tender years. Labor being dearer in this country than it is in any other with which we are brought in competition in manufacturing, operates as a constant inducement to manufacturers to employ female labor, and the labor of children, to the exclusion of men's labor, because they can be had cheaper. . . . . [With the increase of numerous and indigent families in manufacturing districts] there is a strong interest and an urgent motive to seek constant employment for their children at a very early age, if the wages obtained can aid them even but little in bearing the burden of their support. . ... [Causes] are operating, silently perhaps but steadily and powerfully, to deprive young females particularly, and young children of both sexes in a large and increasing class in the community, of those means and opportunities of mental and moral improvement . . . . essential to their becoming . . . . good citizens. . .

...

In four large manufacturing towns, not however including the largest, containing by the last census a population of little less than 20,000, there appear to be 1,895 children between the ages of four and sixteen who do not attend the common schools any portion of the year. . . . . If full and accurate answers were given by all the towns in this Commonwealth, . . . . it is believed there would be developed a state of facts which would at once arrest the attention of the legislature and not only justify but loudly demand legislative action upon the subject.""

Archives, 8,074.

Some documents appear with the report, one containing statements from a considerable number of firms as to the number of children under sixteen employed, their hours of labor and their annual school attendance. As the statements are so incomplete the report seems valueless. A total of 978 children under sixteen is given, the number of hours varying from ten to fourteen per day, the school privileges from none at all to four months. As important towns like Lowell are entirely unrepresented, the report is obviously of little if any value. I am indebted to Mr. C. E. Persons of Harvard University for the use of notes on this report.

71

Report of the Committee on Education on "Whether any or what provision ought to be made for the better education of children employed in manufacturing industries in Massachusetts" (1836). House Document No. 49. The first paragraph quoted is from p. 8, the second from p. 10, the third, p. 11, and the last, pp. 13-14.

Turning from the extent of child labor to the conditions under which children worked, there is also much variation from state to state; but this variation is due rather to standards set by different manufacturing centers than to the interference of state laws. For child labor was practically unregulated in this country until after the Civil War. A few laws had been passed, but they remained on the statute books as so many dead letters. In Massachusets a ten-hour law for children under twelve years was ineffectual,72 and not only in Massachusetts but in Connecticut and Rhode Island, laws which provided a low minimum of "schooling" went unenforced.73 The inevitable result of

this lack of regulation was not only that very young children were worked, but that they were worked long hours, over time, and

12 Act of 1842, chap. 60. The act was ineffective owing to a clause which penalized only those who "knowingly" violated it (Whittelsey, Massachusetts Labor Legislation, pp. 113 and 9, 10).

73 Regarding the situation in Rhode Island, the superintendent of public schools in Providence wrote, "But this law (requiring some school attendance) is, so far as I can learn, a dead letter. There has never been a complaint although it has been violated constantly. The employment of minors now depends upon the necessities and cupidity of parents and the interests of manufacturers. The manufacturing interests are now a controlling power in the state, and it will be extremely difficult to enforce a law against their wishes:" Quoted in Mass. Sen. Doc. (1869) No. 44, p. 37. In Connecticut, the school report of 1839 stated that "in the manufacturing villages. . . . the precise number of children of very tender age, who should have been in school but are thus consigned to excessive and premature bodily labor to the utter neglect of their moral and intellectual training, I cannot give. But the returns from the districts in these villages show that nearly two-thirds of those enumerated have not been in school. The law which was passed many years since, to secure a certain amount of instruction to this class of children is a dead letter in nearly if not every town in the state" (Second Annual Report of Board of Commissioners of Common Schools in Connecticut [Hartford, 1839], p. 24; see also Third Annual Report, p. 21). As to the ineffectiveness of the Massachusetts laws see Whittelsey, op. cit., pp. 9, 10. A somewhat inflammatory writer in the last state charged that the law which prohibited a child under fifteen working more than nine months in a factory without passing the other three in school "is evaded by the cruel and mercenary owners of the children who keep them nine months in one factory and then take them directly to another with a lie in their mouths." Denied in Bartlett, Vindication of the Females in The Lowell Mills (Lowell, 1841), p. 16.