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conclusion Reflections on the Demand and Supply of Child Labor in Early America gloria l. main Surely the first observation to be made about child labor in early America is that children worked as a matter of course. The vast majority of parents needed their contribution for the household income, and all wanted their children to be active and productive. Society as well as parents worried that children who weren’t put to useful labor would get into trouble,go bad,and lose their souls if they weren’t kept so busy the Devil couldn’t get to them. Even well-off parents sent their teenage children away to work. Commenting on this custom in New England, Edmund Morgan speculated more than sixty years ago that Puritan parents were afraid of spoiling their children.1 The work of Ann Kussmaul and others has shown that the English, and probably the French and the Dutch as well, had the same custom of sending their children away to work as servants for stretches of time. In sum, child labor was not restricted by class but was a broad-based European cultural phenomenon as well as an economic necessity for the poor and middling orders of society.2 The supply of child labor in early America, then, was virtually coterminous with the population of children above the age of about seven and was regulated principally by rates of fertility, immigration, and child mortality. Their economic contribution came mainly through the performance of simple agricultural tasks suited to their age and strength, but the growth of household manufacturing in the eighteenth century began to absorb greater amounts of their time. Westward expansion, the agricultural boom of the 1790s, the cessation of immigration during and after the Napoleonic Wars, and the lively burst of manufacturing innovations in the early-nineteenth-century Northeast all 200 children bound to labor affected both the supply and the demand for child labor in complicated ways. We will examine demand first. Most of the essays in this volume focus on a subsection of the population of all working children in early North America, a fraction of unknown size that varied by place and time: those who were bound out by formal means for a term of years to work for someone other than their parents. Our knowledge of them comes mainly from official records of apprenticeship and indenture that pertain to children who had left, or would soon be leaving, their family of birth. The reasons for separation varied, but the primary purpose of the formal proceeding was to assign legal custody of the minor in question. The documents are usually agreements among three parties: the child entering custody, if he or she was capable of understanding and giving consent; the child’s parent, guardian, or sponsor; and the master or employer to whom the child was to be confided. Such agreements were contracts of mutual obligation between child and master in which the child agreed to labor for the master for a term of years and to honor and obey him during that time. The functions performed by masters or employers in return included promises of maintenance for the term of the agreement. The contract might also specify vocational training, vow to teach the child to read and write,and pledge specific rewards for completing the term satisfactorily. The core agreement, however, was the master’s promise to maintain the child during the term of the contract in exchange for the child’s service.3 Despite this uniformity in concept, actual indentures varied widely in their details, as the essays in this collection make abundantly clear. They varied because every locale made its own adaptation of the original institution carried over from the Old World and because of the changing needs of a developing economy and evolving ideas about the nature of children. Indentures served multiple functions in their communities of origin, ranging from the care of orphans to charity for the poor to the use of young servants as agricultural laborers to vocational preparation of children of the propertied classes. More prosperous parents negotiated terms of service for their children at older ages, preferably with kin, and for shorter periods of time. Less prosperous parents bound out their children at younger ages to masters who would adjust their specific demands for labor as their servants grew in years and strength. Contributors to this volume have provided a wealth of detail on these variations, noting...

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