Upon the Altar of Work : Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism

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. Rooted in the crisis over slavery, disagreements about child labor broke down along sectional lines between the North and South. For decades after emancipation, the child labor issue shaped how Northerners and Southerners defined fundamental concepts of American life such as work, freedom, the market, and the state. Betsy Wood examines the evolution of ideas about child labor and the on-the-ground politics of the issue against the backdrop of broad developments related to slavery and emancipation, industrial capitalism, moral and social reform, and American politics and religion. Wood explains how the decades-long battle over child labor created enduring political and ideological divisions within capitalist society that divided the gatekeepers of modernity from the cultural warriors who opposed them. Tracing the ideological origins and the politics of the child labor battle over the course of eighty years, this book tells the story of how child labor debates bequeathed an enduring legacy of sectionalist conflict to modern American capitalist society. |Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Fields of Free Labor: Child Rescue and Sectional Crisis 2 Testing Ground of Freedom: Child Labor in the Age of Emancipation 3 Seeds of a New Sectionalism: Southern Origins of Child Labor Reform 4 Child Labor Abolitionists: A Northern Progressive Vision 5 Cultural Warriors: A Southern Capitalist Vision Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index|"Wood's ambitious book recognizes and highlights the importance of child labor as a cultural symbol and should spark new investigations of this topic." — Journal of American History "This is a highly interesting and novel reading of the child labor reform movement as being deeply imprinted by the debate about slavery. . . . Very welcome and highly recommended study." — H-Sol-Kult "In this engaging book, Betsy Wood invites us to re-evaluate the history of sectionalist conflict through the lens of child labor reform. . . . Upon the Altar of Work demonstrates just how important debates over child labor were to understandings of capitalism, morality, and freedom, in both the North and South, in the years after slavery's legal demise." — American Nineteenth Century History | Betsy Wood is an assistant professor of history at Bard Early College.