Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations Arts & Sciences Winter 12-15-2014 The Boundaries of Youth: Labor, Maturity, and Coming of Age in Early Nineteenth-Century New England, 1790-1850 Jane Fiegen Green Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Green, Jane Fiegen, "The Boundaries of Youth: Labor, Maturity, and Coming of Age in Early Nineteenth-Century New England, 1790-1850" (2014). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 366. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/366 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts & Sciences at Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of History Dissertation Examination Committee: David T. Konig, Chair Mary Ann Dzuback Margaret Garb Lorri Glover Peter J. Kastor The Boundaries of Youth: Labor, Maturity, and Coming of Age in Early Nineteenth-Century New England, 1790-1850 by Jane Fiegen Green A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Washington University in St. Louis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2014 St. Louis, Missouri © 2014, Jane Fiegen Green Table of Contents Acknowledgments iii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: “How I Long for a Little Leisure!”: Work and the Boundary between 37 Childhood and Youth Chapter 2: “One of the Best and Most Prudent Actions in my Life:” Labor Choices, 89 Anxiety, and the Construction of Middle-Class Youth Chapter 3: Becoming a Man or Woman “in Resolution as Well as in Age” 145 Chapter 4: “Forming [the] Habits of Life:” Education, Work, and Coming of Age 208 Chapter 5: To “Enjoy the Fruits of His Own Labor”: Minors, Work, and the Legal 260 Construction of Maturity as Gender and Racial Privilege Chapter 6: “Appreciation and Elevation of Labor”: Working-Class Youth and 311 Middle-Class Citizenship in Early Industrial New England Bibliography 354 ii Acknowledgements Writing this dissertation took a lot of financial, intellectual, and emotional support. The financial support came from many generous sources. The Washington University Graduate School and History Department provided summer stipends to fund my research trips to New England. I also received support from the Massachusetts Historical Society, Houghton Library at Harvard University, and the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium. The archival assistance of the staff at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston Public Library Rare Books Division, Connecticut Historical Society, Rhode Island Historical Society, Schlesinger Library, Houghton Library, Maine Historical Society, Massachusetts State Archive, and the American Antiquarian Society helped me track down obscure sources and decipher illegible handwriting. I am indebted to dedicated historians who are preserving manuscript sources for future generations. Thank you to my advisors, David T. Konig and Mary Ann Dzuback, for making this dissertation better than I could have imagined. I also received intellectual support from many professors, staff, and graduate students at Washington University in St. Louis. My family and friends provided a constant stream of emotional support that helped me weather the anxieties of graduate school. My parents’ unrelenting encouragement made sure I never regretted choosing history over a more practical vocation, like engineering. The last seven years have been an intellectual journey. They have also been a love story. Nathaniel Green started out as a book review partner and now he is a life partner. You should never date someone from your cohort. Unless he’s your soul mate. iii Introduction In May 1805, sixteen-year-old David Damon left his father’s farm in East Sudbury, Massachusetts, and set out for Boston in search of employment. Needing money to fund his tuition at a local academy, Damon took “the principal care of a wharf & store.” Unfortunately, after a few months in the position, Damon and his employer clashed over wages and time off due to illness. Unable to secure satisfactory terms, Damon left the position rather than compromise. In his diary, he called the decision “one of the best & most prudent actions in my life.” He interpreted the outcome not as a consequence of young men’s insecurity in the commercial labor market, but as an expression of his maturity. As he approached “the age of man,” Damon wanted to exercise “some decision & independence, without which it is obvious no man can be of much consequence in society, or even to himself.”1 In April 1839, Malenda Edwards informed her cousin that she had taken work in a textile mill. Although some women considered the labor “beneath [their] dignity,” Edwards remarked that “very many young Ladies…in the factories have given up” the more respectable female occupations of “millinery, dressmaking & school keeping.”2 She chose to ignore the potential degradation of industrial labor rather than confine herself to traditional female employments. Harriet Farley, another Lowell ‘mill girl,’ gained a public reputation when she defended factory work against the criticism of anti-capital labor activists. “The avails of factory labor,” she wrote as the editor of a literary magazine featuring the compositions of factory operatives, “are now greater than those of many domestics, seamstresses, and school-teachers.” Young women entered the mills as a rational choice, “and strange would it be, if in money-loving New England, one of 1 David Damon, “Extracts from David Damon’s Journal, 1803-1810,” 27 Jul 1805, Damon Family Papers (MS Am 2640), Harvard Library (hereafter HL). Emphasis in original unless otherwise stated. 2 Malenda M. Edwards to Sabrina Bennett, 4 Apr 1839, quoted in Thomas Dublin, ed., Farm to Factory Women’s Letters, 1830-1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 74. 1 the most lucrative female employments should be rejected because it is toilsome, or because some people are prejudiced against it. Yankee girls have too much independence for that.”3 During the early nineteenth century, young New Englanders like David Damon, Malenda Edwards, and Harriet Farley translated their anxieties about the commercial economy into an acceptance of the classical liberal maxim that maturity was the path to material prosperity and upward mobility.4 Saddled with the burden to display self-ownership in accordance with the gender-specific expectations of New England society, young men and women used their work experiences to signify their ability to make prudent and respectable choices. Recognition as competent, mature adults required young people to find and demonstrate independence through their work. But the early industrial economy prevented many young men and women from exercising choice in the labor market. As maturity was increasingly linked to privileged forms of work, the democratic ideal that anyone with talent and good character could achieve prosperity masked the emergence of class-based hierarchy in nineteenth-century America. The struggles of young New Englanders show the insidious promise of democratic capitalism that expanded economic and political equality, but made the individual responsible for proving his or her worth. Damon, Edwards, and Farley’s reflections on the relationship between employment and independence expose the impact of economic change on the process of growing up. In colonial New England, production occurred within the household. A male patriarch owned land or the means of a trade and had legal claim to the labor of his household dependents: wife, children, servants, apprentices, slaves, and others. In return, he was responsible for their livelihood and their moral discipline. In this environment, young people worked because of their dependent 3 [Harriet Farley], “Factory Girls,” Lowell Offering, December 1840. 4 Joyce Oldham Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), 5; James L. Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765-1900 (Baton Rouge [La.]: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), xxi, 124. 2 status. Children were integrated into adult habits and responsibilities early in life: by age six or eight, they dressed in adult clothing, worked alongside their fathers or mothers, and attended strict religious services. During their early teens and twenties, young men and women assumed greater labor responsibilities and prepared to form a household of their own. Puritans took great interest in individuals’ progression through the “ages of man” on their path toward salvation, but accepted a social order that relegated individuals to particular ranks.5 Patronage, not individual striving, was “the basic means of social mobility.”6 Puritans called youth “a chusing time,”7 but in fact “there were few substantial choices to be made.” In the agrarian economy, work was a feature of dependence within the household and, as John Demos describes, “development toward full maturity could be accomplished in a gradual, piecemeal, and largely automatic fashion.”8 During the eighteenth century, many New England