A Question. Lincoln and Child Labor issue.

[David Lockmiller]

(05-07-2020 10:37 PM)Susan Higginbotham Wrote:  There seem to have been a few efforts afoot but I think in Lincoln's time it was overshadowed by other concerns, especially slavery (which of course had its own form of child labor). The child labor reform movement was more of a late-19th-century development, and even then substantial progress wasn't made until well into the 20th century. There's a timeline of developments in the United States here:

http://stopchildlabor.org/?p=1795

If you recall Mr. Lincoln's "first dollar" story to Secretary Seward, he made the comment that "I belonged, you know, to what they call down South, the ‘scrubs;’ people who do not own slaves are nobody there."

For the "scrubs," everything had to be done by the family, including the children. Education had to be purchased and was therefore a luxury. All of this was a "fact of life" for many families.