IV Care of Dependent Children
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries binding out or apprenticeship remained the preferred way of caring for children who were dependent on the public for support. For various reasons the age at which the children were bound out tended to rise and consequently the period during which the community continued to be responsible for their care lengthened. Whereas in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century it had been customary to bind the children to masters when they were barely out of infancy, the newer tendency was to maintain them as public charges until they reached the age of eight, ten, or twelve. When it was possible to bind out children at earlier ages it may be assumed that poor law officials took advantage of the opportunity. The growth of humanitarian sentiment led to greater appreciation for the special needs of very young children and on the sea- board, at least, the conquest of the wilderness had proceeded far enough by the 1740's to make it seem less necessary to set tiny boys and girls to work. Moreover, with the spread of slavery and the greater availability of indentured servants and redemptioners, it became more difficult to find masters and mistresses willing to accept children whose extreme youthfulness made them more trouble to keep than their labor was worth.
Public acceptance of responsibility for dependent children during a longer period of childhood did not necessarily mean that the responsibility was well or cheerfully discharged. The majority of dependent children, like the majority of dependent adults, were maintained in their own homes or boarded out at public expense--if they could meet the often stringent requirements for settlement and other tests of eligibility for relief. The "New England" or vendue method of pauper relief was an ingenious and thrifty variant of boarding out: the town poor, young and old, were auctioned off, either singly or in lots, to the lowest bidders. It sometimes happened that a likely looking youth, old enough to be useful on a farm or in a shop, might be "bid down" to nothing, then "bid up," and finally "struck off" to someone who was willing to pay the town for the boy's labor. [1a]
During the latter half of the eighteenth century the larger cities, where the problem of poor relief was most serious, maintained almshouses which, by the 1800's, housed hundreds of paupers. [1b] Many of these were children, who, despite some efforts to segregate the inmates, mingled with older paupers, the insane, and persons suffering from venereal disease. Prior to 1800 orphan homes or asylums for unfortunate children were rare. A few such institutions had been founded under the pressure of emergencies [1c] or, as in the case of George Whitefield's Bethesda, in response to the effort and determination of a dominant personality. The increasingly active part women took in benevolent activities after the Revolution led to an increase in the number of orphan homes, many of which were intended to shelter girls who might otherwise have had to go to the almshouse. When the great age of orphanage founding set in after 1830, precedents had already been established for granting public subsidies to private institutions. Since the orphanages, although managed and operated by private associations, performed services that were beneficial to society, they were deemed entitled to assistance from public funds.
Whether maintained at home, in almshouses, or orphan homes, poor children, upon reaching "suitable age," were bound out to serve farmers, tradesmen, sea captains, or housewives during the rest of their minority. There are instances of overseers of the poor binding children to work in factories, but this practice was less prevalent in the United States than in England.
The practice of consigning free born boys and girls to involuntary servitude simply because they were poor hardly squared with the political philosophy of the Revolution and the young republic. The practice continued, but under the legal fiction that the children were being apprenticed. [1d] By the end of the eighteenth century laws governing the apprenticing of poor children sometimes contained provisions offering slightly more protection than formerly to bound children and requiring overseers of the poor to ascertain that the terms of the indenture were observed by the master. The extent to which these provisions were carried out varied greatly, not only from state to state, but also from town to town, city to city, and county to county. Weak as the protection afforded children indentured under the poor law was, the public standard for working age (the age at which children were bound out) generally was higher than that observed by those parents who allowed or compelled their own children to go to work at a tender age.
1a. For an example see Grace Abbott, The Child and the State (Chicago, 1938), II, 4.