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Between Dependency and Liberty: The Conundrum of Children's Rights in the Gilded Age
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 August 2010
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The Civil War, by abolishing chattel slavery, launched a revolutionary era in American constitutionalism during which lawmakers debated what liberty, dependency, and good governance would mean in the new nation. Although historians have made a convincing case for the significance of legal developments in the 1870s and 1880s, they have not focused much attention on the problem of children's rights in the age of slave emancipation. This is largely due to the assumption that the history of children's rights did not begin until the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decisions in Brown v. the Board of Education (1954) and In re Gault (1967). This article, however, builds on the work of scholars, such as Joseph Hawes and Mary Ann Mason, who have demonstrated that the ideas and practices central to the modern children's rights movement of the late twentieth century have deep roots in American history. I argue that a sophisticated conception of children's rights existed in the late nineteenth century and investigate how lawmakers in Illinois articulated it through their attempts to define the “rights” of “dependent children.”
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References
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45. The remainder of the section read: “and no conviction shall work corruption of blood or forfeiture of estate; nor shall any person be transported out of the state for any offense committed within the same.” Article II, Section 11.
46. The remainder of the section read: “he ought to obtain, by law, right and justice freely, and without being obliged to purchase it, completely and without denial, promptly, and without delay.” Article II, Section 19.
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99. Ibid., 313.
100. Ibid., 309.
101. Ibid.
102. This notice requirement only applied if the parents or guardians were in the county at the time.
103. As Martha Minow has noted, “The problem of insuring that advocates work towards the best interests of the client is inherent in any system which uses counsel to represent clients. Where one party is given the authority to put forward another's interests, there is always the danger that the agent will not be faithful to the interests of his client. The agent may have misperceived what the client wanted. The agent may believe something to be in the client's interests when it actually is not. Finally, wherever power is delegated, there is always the potential and incentive for the agent to put his own interests ahead of those of his client. These problems infect almost every human relationship.” Minow, Interpreting Rights, 1889–90.
104. “An Act for Industrial Schools for Girls,” 310
105. Ibid., 312.
106. Ibid.
107. Ibid.
108. Ibid., 310.
109. Ibid., 313.
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113. “Petition of Alexander M. Ferrier,” n.p.
114. “Abstract, In the Matter of the Petition of Alexander M. Ferrier To Have Winifred Breem [sic] Declared A Dependent Girl,” Case No. 20610, Supreme Court Archives, Spring-field, Illinois, p. 3.
115. Ibid.
116. According to the 1880 census track, Ferrier and his wife had four daughters (Agnes, age 11; Anna, age 9; Helen, age 8; and Gracie, age 6). Dr. Hanson testified that he had several children.
117. “Abstract,” p. 3.
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119. “Abstract,” p. 4.
120. This paragraph is drawn from Beveridge's testimony, which is printed on an insert, located between pages three and four of the “Abstract.”
121. Ibid. (emphasis in original).
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123. “Appellant's Brief,” Case No. 20610, Supreme Court Archives, Springfield, Illinois, p. 7 (emphasis in original) [hereafter Willett's Brief].
124. “Willett's Brief,” p. 4. The opposing counsel, N. M. Jones, mocked Willett for this argument: “He is afraid lest Cook county shall be a refuge for dependent girls from all parts of the world! He seems as greatly agitated in regard to their irruption as the Californians are in regard to the Chinese. This school, however, has, been established four years, and yet Cook county, with its 600,000 inhabitants, has now committed to said school less than forty girls, although thousands of boys and girls are annually arrested in said county and punished for crime.” “Appellee's Brief,” Case No. 20610, Supreme Court Archives, Springfield, Illinois p. 8 [hereafter Jones's Brief].
125. “Willett's Brief,” p. 5
126. Ibid.
127. According to section 8 of the Industrial School Act, “The fees for conveying a dependent girl to an Industrial School for Girls, shall be the same as conveying a juvenile offender to the Reform School for Juvenile Offenders, at Pontiac, in this State, and they shall be paid by the counties from which such dependent girls are sent, unless they are paid by the parent or guardian.” “An Act for Industrial Schools for Girls,” 311.
128. Ibid., 313.
129. Article 8, Section 3 of the Illinois Constitution of 1870 declared: “Neither the General Assembly, nor any city, town, township, school district or other public corporation shall ever make any appropriation, or pay from any public fund whatever, anything in aid of any church or sectarian purpose, or to help support or sustain any school, academy, seminary, college, university, or other literary or scientific institution, controlled by any church or sectarian denomination whatever; nor shall any grant or donation of land, money or other personal property ever be made by the State, or any such public corporation, to any church, or for any sectarian purpose.”
130. “Appellant's Brief,” Case No. 6293, Supreme Court Archives, Springfield, Illinois, p. 6.
131. Ibid., 9.
132. Ibid., 12.
133. “Appellee's Brief,” Case No. 6293, Supreme Court Archives, Springfield, Illinois, p. 6.
134. “Jones' Brief,” 15.
135. Ibid., 18.
136. Petition of Ferrier, 103 Ill. 367 (1882).
137. Ibid., 371.
138. Ibid., 372.
139. Ibid., 374.
140. Ibid., 373.
141. Justice Sheldon was relying upon William Blackstone, Commentaries of the Laws of England, vol. 1, 125. It is not clear which edition he used.
142. For an overview of Sheldon's life and career, see Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois, 477.
143. Ferrier, 373.
144. Ibid., 374.
145. Humphreys, 383.
146. Six years later, for example, the court did declare that the Chicago Industrial School for Girls, a Catholic school, was a sectarian institution. County of Cook v. The Chicago Industrial School for Girls, 125 Ill. 540 (1888).
147. Humphreys, 383–84.
148. “An Act to Provide For and Aid Training Schools for Boys,” Laws of Illinois (Springfield: H. W. Broker's Printing House, 1883).Google Scholar Due to the different ages of majority for boys and girls in Illinois, the length of commitments differed. Training schools retained custody over boys until they turned twenty-one, whereas industrial schools had custody over girls only until they turned eighteen. Training schools received smaller subsidies than industrial schools. They were paid from between $7 to $9 per boy, considerably less than the $10 per-child subsidy paid to industrial schools.
149. See, for example, Tanenhaus, David S., Juvenile Justice in the Making (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).Google Scholar For analysis of African Americans keeping the spirit of the Civil War and Reconstruction alive, see Blight, David W., Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001).Google Scholar For the status of civil rights law in Illinois in the 1880s, see Dale, Elizabeth, “Social Equality Does Not Exist among Them or Us: Baylies vs. Curry and Civil Rights in Chicago, 1888,” American Historical Review 102 (April 1997): 311–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In his influential brief for Pierce v. Oregon (1925), the Columbia Law professor William D. Guthrie, for example, cited Turner as a precedent that supported the liberty of parents. Mr. William D. Guthrie, with whom Mr. Bernard Hershhoff was on the brief, for appellee in No. 583, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 519 (1925). For discussion of Guthrie's role in the parental rights cases of the 1920s, see Woodhouse, , “Who Owns the Child?” 1070–80Google Scholar.
150. Commonwealth v. Fisher, 213 Pa. 48, 53 (1905).
151. Tanenhaus, David S., “Growing Up Dependent: Family Preservation in Early Twentieth-Century Chicago,” Law and History Review 19 (Fall 2001): 547–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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