Between Dependency and Liberty: The Conundrum of Children's Rights in the Gilded Age

Abstract

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 inBrown v. the Board of Education(1954) andIn 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.”