This book examines how debates about children and their labor shaped the way Northerners and Southerners defined fundamental concepts of American life such as work, freedom, morality, and the market from the 1850s through the 1930s. Initially, Northerners and Southerners clashed over child labor in the context of the sectional crisis over slavery. For decades after the Civil War, debates about child labor bore the traces of this sectionalist conflict. Reformers, who eventually came to see child labor as the worst evil of the nation since slavery, mobilized politically in a national movement to ... More

This book examines how debates about children and their labor shaped the way Northerners and Southerners defined fundamental concepts of American life such as work, freedom, morality, and the market from the 1850s through the 1930s. Initially, Northerners and Southerners clashed over child labor in the context of the sectional crisis over slavery. For decades after the Civil War, debates about child labor bore the traces of this sectionalist conflict. Reformers, who eventually came to see child labor as the worst evil of the nation since slavery, mobilized politically in a national movement to abolish child labor with the power of the progressive state, liberating children to develop their potential in a burgeoning consumer market society. To defeat this movement, the opponents of reform also mobilized politically, asserting an opposing vision of American freedom that drew on traditional understandings of familial authority and the moral value of free labor. Tracing the ideological origins and the politics of the battle over child labor over the course of eighty years, this book tells the story of how child labor debates bequeathed an enduring legacy of sectionalist conflict within a post-emancipation, modern capitalist society.