The "Join, or Die" snake, a cartoon image printed in numerous newspapers as the conflict between England and France over the Ohio Valley was expanding into war—"the first global war fought on every continent," as Thomas Bender recently has written—first appeared in the May 9, 1754 edition of Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette. The image displayed a snake cut up into eight pieces. The snake’s detached head was labeled "N.E." for “New England,” while the trailing seven sections were tagged with letters representing the colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The exhortation "JOIN, or DIE" appeared underneath the image.

Lester C. Olson points out that Franklin might have seen images of snakes divided into two segments that had been published in Paris in 1685, 1696, and 1724 with the similar caption "Se rejoinder ou mourir." The image in the Pennsylvania Gazette followed an article reporting the recent surrender of a British frontier fort to the French army and purported plans of the French, with their Indian allies, to establish a massive frontier presence with which to terrify British settlers and traders. The article ended with the surmise that the French were confident they would be able to "take an easy Possession of such Parts of the British Territory as they find most convenient for them" due to the "present disunited State of the British Colonies" and warned that the French success "must end in the Destruction of the British interest; Trade and Plantations in America."

A longtime advocate of intercolonial union in dealings with Indians, Franklin helped make such a union an important agenda item for the Albany Congress, convened shortly after the snake image was published, on earlier orders from the Board of Trade, the British advisory council on colonial policy, with the goal of establishing one treaty between all the colonies and the Six Nations of Iroquois. As a commissioner to the congress appointed by the governor of Pennsylvania, Franklin was opposed in his efforts to unify the colonies by representatives of some of the colonial assemblies intent on maintaining control over their own affairs.

Robert C. Newbold has speculated that Georgia was probably excluded from the snake image, "because, as a defenseless frontier area, it could contribute nothing to common security." Only three laws had been passed in Georgia since its founding as a colony in 1732, prompting a historian of the colony and state to conclude, "The hope that Georgia might become a self-reliant province of soldier-farmers had not succeeded, and even the early debtor-haven dream had not come to pass." Delaware, Newbold added, "shared the same governor, albeit a different legislature, as Pennsylvania; hence the Gazette probably considered it as included with Pennsylvania."

As with the snake image, the Albany Plan, drafted during the congress, did not include Georgia and Delaware in its proposed colonial union for mutual defense and security, specifying only Massachusetts Bay, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The segmented snake image was revived in a number of newspapers during the 1765 Stamp Act conflict, again without reference to Georgia and Delaware. In 1774, when the segmented snake image, along with the "Join or Die" slogan, was employed as a masthead for newspapers in York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, a pointed tail labeled "G" for Georgia had been added.

Dred Scott was one of the most famous slaves in American history. By filing for freedom in St. Louis Circuit Court on April 6, 1846, this husband and father of two girls set in motion a chain of events that helped bring about the coming of the Civil War and the destruction of slavery.

Scott was born about 1800 in Virginia, and grew up as the property of Peter Blow. The Blow family moved westward and eventually settled in St. Louis, MO, by 1830. A few years later, U.S. Army surgeon John Emerson purchased Scott and brought him to Illinois and then the Wisconsin Territory. At Fort Snelling (in what is now Minnesota), Dred Scott married Harriet Robinson, who was owned by another white man living in the fort. Dred and Harriet Scott then raised two girls, Eliza and Lizzie.

After returning to St. Louis. John Emerson died in 1843, and his widow Irene Emerson, with the help of her brother, John Sanford, began hiring out Dred and Harriet to other slaveholders. However, because the Scotts had been held as slaves in free states and territories–not just during transit or “sojourn,” but for extended periods of time—they were eligible to sue in Missouri courts for freedom. Many historians now believe that Harriet Scott discovered this information from her pastor and was behind their freedom suits in April 1846.

The Scotts brought suit against Mrs. Emerson in 1846, which was decided against them, but in a subsequent action in 1850 the court sided with the Scotts. The Scotts had a strong legal claim, derived from the principle known as “once free, always free” and protected within the federal system by the doctrine of comity, meaning that the states had to honor each other’s laws. The startling reversal by the Missouri Supreme Court in 1852 of an earlier legal victory by the Scotts signaled a dramatic breakdown in comity and the rising threat of disunion. Both pro- and anti-slavery forces quickly realized the national implications of the state verdict and re-filed arguments in federal courts as Dred Scott v. Sandford.

The legal battle continued until March 6, 1857, when Chief Justice Roger Taney read a sweeping majority opinion from the Supreme Court that denied blacks federal citizenship rights, swept aside comity concerns, and invalidated the 1820 Missouri Compromise legislation, declaring that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories. The furious backlash against the decision by Northern Republicans essentially guaranteed that the election of 1860 would be one of the most significant in American history.

Dred Scott, however, was not alive to see either that political contest or the war that subsequently ended slavery. He had died in 1858, a free man and head of a free household. Taylor Blow, the son of Dred Scott’s first owner, had made the remarkable decision in May 1857 to purchase the entire Scott family and set them free. There are still descendants of the Scotts alive today.

The short answer is this: If you mean full-time work (with certain exceptions) ―none were employed, at least legally.

This was the result of the signing into law in 1938 (two years before) of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Wake Forest University Economics Professor Robert Whaples puts it succinctly: "the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 prohibited the full-time employment of those 16 and under (with a few exemptions) and enacted a national minimum wage which made employing most children uneconomical." Whaples describes the various reasons, apart from the enactment of federal, state, and local laws, why the numbers of children working in industry and on the farm had already declined dramatically over the first few decades of the 20th century before the passage of the Act.

The provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) that dealt with child labor stated: "No employer shall employ any oppressive child labor in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce or in any enterprise engaged in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce."

The FLSA, as further defined by statute, prohibited children under 16 from any kind of employment in certain hazardous kinds of work. The Secretary of Labor has periodically revised such categories of hazardous work. For agricultural work, for example, those under 16 should not be employed in operating a tractor of over 20 horsepower, or a hay baler, a forklift, a power post-hold digger, or a chain saw. Nor should they work in a yard or stall in which there is a bull, boar, or stud horse, a sow with suckling pigs, or a cow with newborn calf.

The FLSA also prohibits those under 18 from certain kinds of occupations altogether. These include occupations that require working with explosives or radioactive materials, operating most power-driven woodworking, baking, or meat processing machines, as well as most jobs in mining, meatpacking, logging, and brick-making.

The FLSA exempts certain kinds of work, including employment of children by their parents, and church work. Boys and girls also worked (as they do today) at jobs not covered by FLSA regulations, such as office or clerical work, retail sales positions, food preparation, caring for younger children, and so on.

Given these exemptions, what was the actual number working in 1940?

Gertrude Folks Zimand, General Secretary of the National Child Labor Committee, in "The Changing Picture of Child Labor," published in 1944 in the Journal of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (pages 83-91), reported that the 1940 census showed, among 14- to 15-year-olds, a total of 4,347,665 attending school, and a total of 209,347 gainfully employed (no number was reported for children ages 7-14 who were not in school but were gainfully employed, but the number of these children attending school was 15,034,695; the numbers for 16- to 17-year-olds were 3,361,206 in school and 662,967 gainfully employed). The term "Gainfully employed" included full- and part-time work, either in industry or agriculture. There was some overlap in these numbers because some children were in school but were also working, at least part-time. But according to Zimand, 64 percent of the 14- to 15-year-olds and 83 percent of the 16- to 17-year-olds who were working were out of school and were therefore presumably working full time.