USA > Massachusetts > Commonwealth history of Massachusetts, colony, province and state, volume 3 > Part 47
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N. B. Extra Carriages can be obtained of the proprietor's, at Boston au Plymouth, at short notice .- «STAGE BOOKS' kept at Boyden's Marketsquare, Boston, and at Fessendon's, Plymouth.
LEONARD & WOODWARD.
BOSTON, Noveniber 24, 1810.
From an original Courtesy of the Bostonian Society
MAIL STAGE POSTER
Washington's Ve The Fast Colton PM
October 30, 1789.
Courtesy of State Street Trust Company, Boston
FIRST COTTON MILL IN NEW ENGLAND AT BEVERLY, MASS.
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CHILD LABOR
this crisis stimulated "technical improvements," and hastened the introduction of automatic weaving.
CHILD LABOR
No characteristic of this period is more striking to the modern investigator than the wide-spread approval of child labor. Work was recognized as a builder of character. Child- ren were expected to enjoy the benefits of rigorous training while contributing their bit to the slender money income of the family. Thus, as a matter of course, Alvah Crocker in 1810 went to work at the age of eight to earn twenty-five cents per day. His work day was twelve hours long and he was able to go to school for only six weeks in the year. Be- fore the coming of the factory, a farm family, according to Clark, earned only two hundred dollars a year. After the children were employed in the mills the family income might increase to five hundred or six hundred dollars per year. Here, surely, was an incentive; and the annals of the period are full of examples of its application, a few of which will be cited.
In 1770, the legislature received a petition from William Molineux, of Boston, to assist him in his plan for "manufac- turing the children's labor into wearing apparel" and "employ- ing young females, from eight years old and upward, in earning their own support." Public opinion commended him because owing to his efforts "the female children of this town .... are not only useful to the community but the poorer sort are able in some measure to assist their parents in getting a livelihood."
President Washington, in 1789, commends as "ingenious" a "sail manufactory" in Boston where there were fourteen girls "spinning with both hands, the flax being fastened to their waists," other girls being employed to turn the wheels for them. In 1789, a petition in behalf of the "first cotton factory" at Beverly, Massachusetts, states that "it will afford employment to a great number of women and children, many of whom will be otherwise unless, if not burdensome to society."
Child labor was approved not only as a means of rendering industries successful and of enhancing family incomes but also for its moral value. Mathew Carey calls attention to the
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SOCIAL CONDITIONS AND CHANGES
"vice and immorality to which children are exposed by a career of idleness." It is of course true that, except for the long hours and confinement, the labor of women and children was often conducted under conditions that were almost idyl- lic as compared with some of the factories of the present day. Such conditions in the early Lowell factories were later de- scribed entertainingly by Lucy Larcom. But in the later period, when children left their homes to live in corporation boarding houses, there were doubtless new dangers' and the deprivation of the children from contact with their own fami- lies may have been even more serious than the dangers to health and physique from long hours, confinement and hard work.
EFFORTS AT REFORM OF CHILD LABOR
In 1825 the Committee on Education of the Massachusetts Senate reported that there was no need for legislative inter- ference in behalf of the child operatives. They did state, however, that "this is a subject almost deserving the parental care of a vigilant government." Even as late as 1842 a ten hour law for children in industry, under twelve years of age, was ineffectual, owing to a clause which penalized only those who knowingly violated it.
The significance of this situation in the third decade of the nineteenth century is vigorously presented by Calhoun in his Social History of the American Family:
"A Boston paper of 1832 contains reference to tables show- ing the gain to the community from having women spin and weave in factories instead of at home. In the factories they may earn perhaps one hundred twenty-five dollars each per year. But the strain of factory labor, of a different nature from old-fashioned home industry, however trying that may be, coupled with unsanitary surroundings and unhygienic hab- its, raised a serious problem with regard to the health of the future mothers of the race, a problem that is still unsettled. In this way factory industry has an additional bearing on the family. In the early factory with its long working-day the ventilation and lighting were poor, and the corporation board- ing-houses were overcrowded and unsanitary. (The Lowell Manufacturing Company's rules, 1830-1840, provided that all employees must board at the company house and observe its
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PUBLIC RELIEF OF THE POOR
minute regulations.) Factory girls often slept six to eight in a room and even three in a bed. A delegate to the first National Trades' Union Convention (1834) asserted that the cotton factories were 'the present abode of wretchedness, dis- ease, and misery.' Mr. D. entered into a description of the effect of the present factory system upon the health and morals of the unhappy inmates, and depicted in a strong light the in- crease of disease and deformity from an excess of labor, want of outdoor exercise, and of good air-of the prevalence of depravity from their exposed situation, and their want of education, having no time or opportunity for schooling, and observed, that the decrepit, sickly, and debilitated inmates of these prison houses were marrying and propagating a race of beings more miserable if possible than themselves. . . . 'We talk,' said Mr. D. 'of the rising generation! What must that generation be, coming from such a stock of disease and deformity !' "
PUBLIC RELIEF OF THE POOR
Few were the families of wealth in the early years which we are considering, and the incomes of many families in the state were too small to provide for their comfort and well- being. The complacent attitude of some of the well-to-do with regard to the condition of the poor is well illustrated in an election sermon by the Reverend John Allyn, May 29, 1805. "The rich," Allyn affirmed, "would be less happy with- out the poor to administer to their leisure and ease; and the poor, in turn, are profited by the stewardship of the rich, whose enterprise, providence and economy enable them to reward their labour and relieve that indigence which springs from indolence, wastefulness and vice, or from sickness and misfortune."
Public outdoor relief, or relief of the poor in their homes, continued in practically the same form which characterized the colonial period, as described in the preceding volume of this work. Cases of poverty were openly discussed in town meeting and in great detail, without consideration for the feelings of the persons in question ; and then a sum of money in relief would be voted. Thus, for example, the Town of Easton in May 1799 voted to Abiel Kinsley nine pounds, four shillings for "shoger and rum for David Randall's family."
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Four pounds, ten shillings was voted to Thomas Manley for a coffin and for digging the grave for Seth Hogg. Four pounds was voted to Israel Woodward for a grave cloth for Seth Hogg and for two quarts of rum expended about the time of his death.
The selling of the poor to the lowest bidder continued into this period. Thus an item in the warrant for the Gardner town meeting of January 5, 1789, reads as follows :
"To see what method the town will come into to take care and provide for Oliver Upton and his family; to vendue them out to the lowest bidder, or to take some other method, as the town shall think best when met. Voted, To vendue them to the lowest bidder. Voted, to choose a committee to draw the condition of sale. The condition of sale of Oliver Upton and his wife are such, that the lowest bidder have them until March meeting, with their household stuff, and to provide victuals and drink, convenient for them; and to take care of them. The Selectmen to take a minute of his household stuff. Also the children to be let out to the lowest bidder until the selectmen can provide better for them; and to provide victuals and drink for them.
"Oliver Upton & wife bid off by Simon Gates, at one shilling per week. Oldest child bid off by Simon Gates at one shil- ling per week. Second child bid off by John Haywood at ten pence per week. Third child bid off by Andrew Beard, at one shilling two pence per week. Fourth child bid off by Ebenezer Bolton, at one shilling, nine pence per week."
DIFFICULTIES OF POOR REFORM
Although the methods above stated seem heartless, we find in this period the beginning of a constructive policy for the rehabilitation of the poor. Thus Chelsea voted twenty pounds to enable a man named Dispau to complete the erection of a dwelling for himself and his family. The town of Harvard in 1753 built a house for Joseph Blood and family. Five years later the town sank a well on the premises; and in 1762 bought them a cow, which, upon the death of the family, they sold in 1778 by vote of town meeting. In 1813 the town of Ashfield built a log hut on town land for Tim Warren, and the
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DIFFICULTIES OF POOR REFORM
selectmen were "to oversee him and see that he gets a living for himself and family."
Public indoor relief continued to develop, though supple- mented in Massachusetts by outdoor relief as described above. The conditions in the almshouses were as undesirable as those in England during the same period, for the almshouses had neither hospital facilities nor workshops. The Boston alms- house, which was authorized by the General Court in 1735 and opened in 1739, was investigated by a special committee in 1790, who reported: "The almshouse in Boston is, perhaps, the only instance known where persons of every description and disease are lodged under the same roof and in some in- stances in the same contagious apartments, by which means the sick are disturbed by the noise of the healthy, and the infirm rendered liable to the vices and diseases of the diseased, and profligate."
To remedy these evils, the construction of a new plant was begun in 1790. Kelso, in his History of Poor Relief in Massa- chusetts, however, reports that "no adequate provision was made for the employment of the able-bodied poor until 1821, when the House of Industry was established as an institution separate from the almshouse." Kelso goes on to state that "the values of classification were not long retained even by this expedient: for according to the eleventh annual report of the House of Industry, rendered in 1834, its population was made up of 61 persons who were either insane or idiotic, 134 who were sick and infirm, 104 boys and girls of school age, 28 children at nurse, and an unclassified remainder of 201 among whom were 64 men who worked at picking oakum. From an institution for the employment of the able-bodied poor, it had fallen to the level of the unclassified almshouse."
"The story of almshouse care in Boston is, with due allow- ance for the complication due to her location as the chief port of the region, the story of almshouse care in other places. Almshouses were shelters where all classes of dependents were housed, fed, and clothed. Unclassified grouping tended to level the best down to the grade of the worst."
The special report of the Department of Overseers of the Poor in Boston in 1821 states that the almshouse population of that year comprised 78 sick persons, 77 children, 9 maniacs
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SOCIAL CONDITIONS AND CHANGES
and idiots, 155 unclassified inmates mostly old and decrepit. The almshouse children, said to average 150, were stated to include "orphans and others." Kelso in his summary of the report states :
"Some attempt was made to classify them in two groups according to sex, and to give them rudimentary schooling. The accommodation in the House of Industry at the same period revealed the same unclassified mixture. There were eighty-seven lodging rooms for the poor; six cells for punish- ment; six dormitories for insane men; eight for insane wo- men; and a schoolhouse in which the children were instructed. They lived among the paupers, the vicious and the insane. Instead of a house of industry, that establishment was in 1821 a general infirmary, an asylum for the insane, and a refuge for the deserted and most destitute children of the city. The inmates themselves looked after the small children and the lunatics, while the older children looked after them- selves. Of the one hundred and eighty-three children then resident at the House of Industry, ninety-five were of foreign birth or parentage."
THE LAW OF SETTLEMENT (1789 - 1794)
The Massachusetts law of inhabitancy and settlement was completely revised in 1789. Under its provisions, a person acquired settlement in a town who, prior to April 10, 1767, had lived there a year without "warning out"; or if he had obtained settlement by birth, marriage, or otherwise; or if he owned an estate or freehold in the town with a clear an- nual income of three pounds and occupied the premises for two whole years; or if, after the age of 21, he had resided in one town and paid town taxes for five consecutive years; or had resided there ten years without being "warned out." A wife obtained the inhabitancy of her husband, and legitimate children were deemed inhabitants at birth.
The following year, however, the law was revised to require three years of residence instead of two, and in 1791 it became four years instead of three. In 1793 it was extended to five years. It is obvious, therefore, that the towns of Massachu- setts were continuously attempting to dodge the burden of
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THE LAW OF SETTLEMENT
supporting the local poor, and to thrust that burden upon the state.
Hence, February 11, 1794, a comprehensive state law of settlement was enacted, which has been summarized by Kelso as follows :
"1. A married woman follows and has the settlement of her husband if he has any: if not, she retains her own at the time of her marriage.
2. If the unsettled husband of a settled wife requires aid from the State, he shall receive it in place of her settlement, the State reimbursing.
3. Legitimate children follow and have the settlement of their father, if he has any, until they gain for themselves; if he has none, then they follow the mother in like manner.
4. Illegitimate children follow the mother's settlement at the time of their birth if she had any; but no child gains settlement by birth if neither parent had a settlement in the place of birth.
5. Any citizen 21 years or over who has an estate of in- heritance of £3 yearly net income, taking the rents and profits three years in succession, is settled in the town where he has such estate and so dwells.
6. Any citizen, as above, who has an estate of freehold of £60 value and pays taxes on same for five years in succession is settled where he has such estate.
7. Any town officer is settled ipso facto.
8. A settled and ordained minister is settled in the place of his pastorate.
9. Any person may be admitted to settlement by town vote after article is placed in the warrant for such consideration.
10. Any minor who serves four years' apprenticeship and actually sets up in business in the town where he has served within one year after his term, being then 21 years old and who continues such trade for five years, is settled in that place.
11. Any citizen 21 years or over who resides in any town for ten years and pays all taxes duly assessed for any five years within that time is settled in that town.
12. Every settlement when gained continues till lost or defeated by the gaining of another elsewhere."
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SOCIAL CONDITIONS AND CHANGES
Illegitimacy was recognized as a special problem by the legislature as early as 1789. In that year a statute stated that an illegitimate child "shall be deemed and taken as an inhabitant with his mother." This means that under the law of settlement, during his minority his settlement follows hers. In the Settlement Act of 1794 this was changed, and the child was to continue to have the settlement of the time of his birth, even though that of his mother should change. The present law of Massachusetts reverts to the practice of 1789 so that the child and mother may be kept together.
CARE OF DEFECTIVES
In Chapter 44 of the Resolves of 1819, Massachusetts pro- vided for the support of the deaf, dumb and blind by board- ing selected cases in the Asylum at Hartford, Connecticut. "Thereafter," Kelso reports, "the appropriation was always exhausted and the quota from Massachusetts always filled. Down to 1865 an amount somewhat in excess of $306,000 had been expended for this class of dependents."
The need of special care for the blind, though recognized in this Act of 1819, was much more deeply studied a few years later, after Doctor John D. Fisher had visited in Paris the school founded by Valentin Hauy. Money was raised in 1827 to collect information on the number of blind persons in need of schooling. At a meeting held in the Exchange Coffee House on February 10, 1829, it was estimated that there were 400 blind persons in Massachusetts, and 1500 in the New England states. The meeting agreed to organize a school, and in the same month asked the Legislature to in- corporate it as "The New England Asylum for the Blind." This was done unanimously and without debate, and provi- sion was made for a census of the blind. A board of trustees was established, to include the Governor and Lieutenant Gov- ernor of the state, the President of the Senate, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives. This was the beginning of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts School for the Blind, now recognized as one of the leading educational in- stitutions in the world for blind children. The impetus for this great charity, which influenced the whole country, was
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PRIVATE CHARITIES
principally the public spirit and generosity of Joseph Perkins of Boston.
Public interest in the problem is displayed in articles in The Columbian Centinel of Boston, January 17, 1825; The Boston Recorder, February 29, 1829; The National Philan- thropist and Investigator, March 18, 1829; as well as in The Boston Athencum of 1820 (page 221), and The New Eng- land Galaxy of February 27, 1827, and August 15, 1828.
One of the organizers of the school was the historian William H. Prescott, who was himself blind. Doctor Samuel Gridley Howe was made director of the school, and in 1831 visited schools for the blind in Edinburgh, Paris and Berlin. He brought back with him two blind teachers, one from Edin- burgh and one from Paris. In August, 1832, the school was opened temporarily in the home of Dr. Howe's father, and had six pupils. In 1830, the Massachusetts Legislature ap- propriated $1,500 for the school, which was the unexpended balance of a previous grant for the deaf. This appears to have been the first appropriation of public money in America directly for the benefit of the blind.
PRIVATE CHARITIES
Public relief of the poor from the beginning had been sup- plemented by the gifts and kindly services of individuals. The organization of private agencies for philanthropy, however, virtually begins in the period following the Revolutionary War. At least one lasting church charity was established prior to this period. It was the Quarterly Charity Lecture, founded in Boston in 1720. On March 6, 1720, Cotton Mather opened the series of lectures. The collections made were distributed equally among four Congregational churches of Boston who, in turn, dispensed them in charitable service to the poor.
To the earlier period belong also the Scots' Charitable Soci- ety, 1657; the Charlestown Poor's Fund, 1674; the Stough- ton Poor Fund, 1791; the Charitable Irish Society, 1737; the Poor Widows Fund, 1759; and the Pemberton Fund, 1760.
The year 1816 saw the establishment of as many lasting charitable enterprises as had been founded and incorporated
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SOCIAL CONDITIONS AND CHANGES
in the two and a half centuries that preceded the Federal period. The notable list for the years 1786 to 1824 includes the following: 1786, Massachusetts Congregational Charit- able Society; 1786, Massachusetts Humane Society; 1791, Franklin Fund; 1794, Roxbury Charitable Fire Society ; 1794, Massachusetts Charitable Fire Society ; 1796, Boston Dispens- ary; 1800, Boston Female Asylum; 1811, Massachusetts Gen- eral Hospital; 1816, Widows' Society; 1816, British Chari- table Society; 1816, City Missionary Society; 1817, Boston Fatherless and Widows' Society; 1818, McLean Asylum for the Insane; 1818, Penitent Female Refuge and Bethesda So- ciety ; and in 1824, the Massachusetts Charitable Eye and Ear Infirmary.
Contemporary social service was emphasized in the Unita- rian movement under the leadership of William Ellery Chan- ning, and of his classmate, Joseph Tuckerman, who was the first minister at large under the American Unitarian Associa- tion. Tuckerman was born in Boston in 1778, graduated from Harvard College in 1798, and entered the ministry. After twenty-five years of parish work, he devoted the remainder of his life to work as city missionary among the Boston poor. It was in 1832 that he organized a company of visitors to the poor, and in 1833 he brought together ministers at large of all denominations for consultation. This led in 1834 to the formation of the Association of Delegates from the Benevo- lent Societies of Boston.
The Society for the Prevention of Pauperism of Boston, which later became the Industrial Aid Society, was established in 1835, as a result of Dr. Tuckerman's appeals. As its name suggests, its purposes were primarily preventive rather than remedial, and it was one of the pioneers in constructive social service. Francis G. Peabody, in writing of Tuckerman's six years of service as minister at large, states: "This very brief and inconspicuous undertaking ... must always remain the starting point for any history of scientific charity in this country." Tuckerman's reports give a comprehensive picture of the problems of their time, dealing as they do with problems of wages, public education, public and private poor relief, and moral education.
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PROGRESS OF PUBLIC SENTIMENT
PROPHETIC RECOGNITION OF POOR CHILDREN AS PUBLIC WARDS
The period of three decades following the establishment of the American and Massachusetts constitutions ends with a brilliant document composed by Josiah Quincy, first mayor of Boston in 1820. This was a legislative report dealing prima- rily with problems of public poor relief. The inauguration of town and district almshouses was recommended, but with "regular and annual superintendence of the Legislature" of the whole question of the poor, of whom there were said to be 1,100 adults and 450 children in receipt of relief as state poor.
The most striking contribution of Quincy's report, from the contemporary point of view, was its formulation of standards for state responsibility for dependent children and for the betterment of child life.
In Quincy's own words : "Those who are poor and in infancy or childhood ... have a right to require from society a distinct attention and more scrupulous and precise supervision. Their career of existence has but just commenced. They may be rendered blessings or scourges to society. Their course may be happy or miserable, honorable or disgraceful, according to the specific nature of the provision made for their support and education."
Although little was immediately accomplished as a result of this report, one may ascribe to it, perhaps more than to any other one document of the period, the developing constructive interest in childhood which led in later years to the pioneer- ing work in child guardianship for which Massachusetts is justly renowned. The juvenile court and probation system of Massachusetts, as well as the present remarkable system of caring for State minor wards under the Commissioner of Public Welfare, unquestionably had their roots in the early penetrating studies made by highly trained public servants of the stamp of Josiah Quincy and Joseph Tuckerman.
PROGRESS OF PUBLIC SENTIMENT
This period, then, though characterized by relative back- wardness in public education, and by uncontrolled exploita- tion of children in the initial stages of large-scale manufac-
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SOCIAL CONDITIONS AND CHANGES
ture, was one of rapidly developing social conscience and of pioneering activity in judicious and forward-looking social legislation. Breadth of vision was perhaps best exemplified in the abolition of slavery, and was progressively illustrated in the remarkable series of attempts to improve the public law relating to poor relief. These protests brought about the Quincy report of 1820, the establishment of a State-controlled institution for the blind, and the social-service activities some- what later of Joseph Tuckerman. They prove that the pre- ventive and constructive social policies of the twentieth cen- tury, for which Massachusetts is justly famed, had their roots, not only in the town meeting's struggle with poverty and other social problems, but also in the social leadership freely offered by highly trained men in the service of their Common- wealth.
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