EDITOR'S PREFACE
This is the
first of three volumes dealing with the history of public policy toward
children and youth in
Volume I covers a period of 265 years—the span
of four lifetimes—extending from the founding of the early English settlements
to the end of the Civil War. Volume II includes events occurring within the
space of a single life, the years between 1866 and 1932; and Volume III deals
with policies adopted and developed since 1933. The briefer time period covered
in Volume II and the still briefer period dealt with in Volume III reflect the
great expansion of interest in, and concern for, the rights and problems of
children and youth during the past century. Richard Titmuss,
commenting on the appearance of the same phenomenon in
This volume deals with nine or more generations
of children who lived in America before the revolution of which Titmuss speaks. It examines the status of children and
youth in American society in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and first two-thirds
of the nineteenth centuries. The major topics treated are education, labor,
dependency, delinquency, child health, and the special problems of slave,
Indian, immigrant, and free black children.
In format the book is a collection of documents
arranged topically within chronological periods and linked by interpretive
introductions. Although we recognize that documentary history is no more
authentic or objective than narrative history, we have adopted the documentary
approach because it offers the breadth and flexibility required for examining
the ramifications of our subject. Finding, selecting, and organizing the
documents into meaningful patterns has proved almost as challenging and
rewarding as the writing of narrative history. It has been impossible to avoid
overlap between topics because education, child labor, health, dependency, and
delinquency are closely related subjects. Instead of attempting to maintain
rigid topical distinctions we have tried to present similar problems from
different viewpoints. We have also crossed chronological lines when subject
matter indicated.
For the sake of clarity, especially in
seventeenth and eighteenth-century documents, we have modernized some spelling
and punctuation. In editing statutes we have sought to eliminate legal
verbiage. All omissions within documents are indicated by ellipsis points.
Since, in numerous documents, large sections have been excised, readers who
require complete transcriptions will find it necessary to refer to the sources.
Our objective has not been to enshrine the documents but to use them to
illustrate the course of events and the development of policies. Footnotes not
supplied by the editors are followed by bracketed explanations of source.
In a work covering a span of more than two and a
half centuries it is necessary to adopt some chronological subdivisions. We
have divided the work into three units or parts with the following dates:
1600-1735; 1735-1820; 1820-1865. Although we have assigned dates to each of the
three parts, we do not ask or expect readers to accept the divisions as
distinct historical periods precisely delimited and widely different from each
other. In history, continuity is sometimes more apparent than change. But
change is what makes a year, a decade, or a century different, in some degree,
from the past. Our purpose in dividing the book into chronological units has
been to identify trends and shifts, sometimes barely perceptible, in the
directions of public attitudes and community responsibility for children.
The three subdivisions of the book represent
stages in the development of public policies toward children. These stages can
be presented in interrogative form. The question raised by the first stage is:
What is the function of government or the public authority when the child is a
subject, not a citizen, of private family government? In the second: How does
the public sector respond when children, although still officially subject to
family or familial authority, practice the doctrines of self-help,
independence, and self-interest? Third: How did the state and the adult public
regard children in a society marked by political and social change, population
mobility, and rapid economic growth? What was expected of children? What was
done for them? What was denied them?
The editors have followed common law and statute
in using twenty-one as the age of majority or the end of childhood. The bulk of
documents in this volume, however, refer to boys and girls under sixteen, the
age group which, in the first federal census of 1790, constituted 49 per cent
of the total white population.2
Youth, the period immediately preceding
maturity, is difficult to define in terms of age because its onset and close
are governed by physical, cultural, and economic factors that vary from time to
time. Before 1865 Americans could not support the luxury of prolonged youth.
Youth problems existed, and there was concern about them; but young people had
to assume many of the responsibilities, if not the rights, of adulthood at an
early age. In Volume I, therefore, more than in the succeeding volumes, public
provision for children looms larger than provision for youth.
The editors share the hope of Dr. Eliot and Dr.
Schmidt that Children and Youth in America will prove useful to students
in the humanities, social sciences, and professional schools of law, medicine,
public health, education, and social work. We hope that this particular volume
will contribute background information and perspective on later developments
and is- sues in the social welfare history of children. Finally, we hope that
the book and the two succeeding volumes will provide a new perspective on American
history. It is possible to read political, constitutional, military,
diplomatic, and some social and intellectual history with- out being aware of
children. It is impossible, however, to study the development of public
policies for children without becoming conscious of adults and their world, and
without seeing that world from a new and different point of view.
R.H.B.
Columbus, Ohio
November 1969
1. Essays on "The Welfare State" (New
Haven, 1959), pp. 30, 32.