During the 1840s and 1850s, leaders throughout the North and West emphasized a set of ideas that seemed to explain why the changes under way in their society benefited some people more than others. They referred again and again to the advantages of what they termed free labor. (The word free referred to laborers who were not slaves. It did not mean laborers who worked for nothing.) By the 1850s, free-labor ideas described a social and economic ideal that accounted for both the successes and the shortcomings of the economy and society taking shape in the North and West.

In rural areas, where the labor of children was more difficult to spare, schools typically enrolled no more than half the school-age children. Textbooks and teachers — most of whom were young women — drummed into students the valued traits of the free-labor system: self-reliance, discipline, and, above all else, hard work. “Remember that all the ignorance, degradation, and misery in the world is the result of indolence and vice,” one textbook intoned. Both in and outside school, free-labor ideology emphasized labor as much as freedom.