A Question. Lincoln and Child Labor issue.

[Susan Higginbotham]

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