The history of early America cannot be told without considering unfree labor. At the center of this history are African and Native American adults forced into slavery; the children born to these unfree persons usually inherited their parents' status. Immigrant indentured servants, many of whom were young people, are widely recognized as part of early American society. Less familiar is the idea of free children being taken from the homes where they were born and put into bondage.As Children Bound to Labor makes clear, pauper apprenticeship was an important source of labor in early America. The economic, social, and political development of the colonies and then the states cannot be told properly without taking them into account. Binding out pauper apprentices was a widespread practice throughout the colonies from Massachusetts to South Carolina-poor, illegitimate, orphaned, abandoned, or abused children were raised to adulthood in a legal condition of indentured servitude. Most of these children were without resources and often without advocates. Local officials undertook the responsibility for putting such children in family situations where the child was expected to work, while the master provided education and basic living needs.The authors of Children Bound to Labor show the various ways in which pauper apprentices were important to the economic, social, and political structure of early America, and how the practice shaped such key relations as master-servant, parent-child, and family-state in the young republic. In considering the practice in English, Dutch, and French communities in North America from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, Children Bound to Labor even suggests that this widespread practice was notable as a positive means of maintaining social stability and encouraging economic development.
Contributors: Monique Bourque, Willamette University; Holly Brewer, North Carolina State University; Gillian Hamilton, University of Toronto; Ruth Wallis Herndon, Bowling Green State University; Steve Hindle, University of Warwick; Paul Lachance, University of Ottawa; Timothy J. Lockley, University of Warwick; Gloria L. Main, University of Colorado, Boulder; John E. Murray, University of Toledo; Jean B. Russo, Historic Annapolis Foundation; Jean Elliott Russo, independent scholar; Adriana E. van Zwieten, Biographical Dictionary of Pennsylvania Legislators; T. Stephen Whitman, Mount St. Mary's University Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America
In Children Bound To Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America, historians Ruth Wallis Herndon and John E. Murry bring together twelve essays focusing on the apprenticeship of orphaned children and children of the poor in a number of different European colonies and early American states between the early 1600s and the mid-1800s. In doing so, this book provides a unique focus upon this often-overlooked part of everyday life during this transitional period.
Part I of the book provides an overview of the book’s intended focus. The editors noted the various reasons why young children might be bound to apprenticeships in their early years. The note that, “[r] ooted in Old World poor laws and customs, it was familiar to colonists and heavily used in English, Dutch, and French communities in North America.” (p. 2). “This book describes pauper apprenticeship, the system used widely in early American to redirect the lives of poor children who were considered illegitimate, orphaned, abandoned, abused, or otherwise considered by authorities to be at risk.” (p. 1).
In Chapter 1, the editors explain how early modern Europeans and early European-Americans viewed households and childhood. It was assumed that children should be trained up to work diligently and to begin learning the adult skills of work, mostly farming, from ages that modern Americans associate with the elementary school years and play. In most colonies, local magistrates were empowered to remove children from homes where it was not thought such training was being provided. Potential masters served, in essence, as substitute fathers. Children placed under indentures would be provided food, housing, clothing, work training, and, over time, perhaps training in reading, writing, and basic math.
After this overview, in Chapter Two, Professors Herndon and Steve Hindle compare the statutes, public policies, and apprenticeship contract in England and its North American colonies. While English indentures focused on keeping children from being supported by the public through the Poor Laws, indentures in the contracts proved more forward-looking, and “tended to emphasize the master’s responsibility to train the child in both work and literacy skills..”
Part II is titled “Binding Out As a Master-Servant Relationship.” The book’s importance is underlined by the conclusion that, when court-ordered apprenticeship is taken into account, many more early Americans were subject to bound labor than most historians have realized.
In Chapter Three, Dr. Herdon discussed the magistrates who bound out children in late colonial and early national period New England. These court officers and the masters to whom they bound young children, she asserts, held that the children of the poor held a subordinate place in the social order. Pauper appretices were being trained to maintain that role as adults without become charges. Chapter Four shifts our focus to nineteenth-century Maryland, where T. Stephen Whiteman provides a nuanced picture of how urban economic change impacted pauper apprenticeship in the urban core and its hinterlands around Baltimore, without a similar change being felt in rural areas where farming remained dominant. Professor Monique Bourque wrote Chapter Four, focusing on children bound out to apprenticeships after residing in the almshouse of Chester County, Pennsylvania from 1800 to 1860. Most interestingly, he uncovers how family and even living parents remained involved in and advocated for their children who had been placed in the almshouse.
In Part III, the editors bring to light essay that look at “Binding Out As A Parent-Child Relationship. In short, masters of paupers served as substitute parents. In Chapter Six, Adriana E. Van Zwiften wrote about apprenticeship as preparing for adulthood in New Netherland before the English took over this colony. In my view, the system did not seem to be markedly different from that observed by English colonies. Chapter Seven shifted the scene of the Charleston, South Carolina orphan home. John E. Murray wrote about this effort to alleviate the plight of poor children in what, at the time of the American Revolution as a very wealthy city, more of a retreat for the state’s planter elite than a functioning business center. He also suggest that, by favoring white children over free black children, the city’s white elite fostered racial unity.
In Chapter 8, Paul Lachante studied rising literacy among New Orleans’s indentured children from 1809 to 1843. The notion of schooling and wide-spread literacy would become a significant new trend in pre-Civil War America. “By age fifteen, about three-fifths of apprentices could sign their indentures.” (p. 120). “Only 33 percent of female sponsors were able to sign the indentures, compared to 81 percent of male sponsors.” (p. 125). The articles suggests that literacy studies need to go beyond studying white boys and men, as well as going beyond studies of formal schooling, as Lachante contends mothers played a substantial role, via teaching at home, in their children gaining literacy.
Chapter Nine brings the reader back to Atlantic coastal south and the city of Savannah, Georgia. Timothy J. Lockley argues that this city’s reformers focused on the children of the poor, who stood the best odds of learning differing and more socially productive modes of thought and life. Again, the role of parents emerges, as the essay noted that “[o]nly about a fifth of the children admitted to the Female Asylum and Union Society were full orphans; nearly two-thirds of the children were indentured by their mothers, with a further 15 percent indentured by their fathers.” (p. 136). As was true in other essays, and other books, these apprentices rarely moved very far up the socio-economic ladder. “About half of all former orphans who paid tax in Savannah never owned any property and paid only the poll tax.” (pp. 143-144). This result brings to mind the conclusions of Dr. Sharon V. Salinger in “To serve well and faithfully:” Labor and indentured servants in Pennsylvania, 1682-1820, a study of late indentured servants in colonial and early national Pennsylvania. In short, these institutions did not tend to provide the basis for upward mobility. In this case, neither did these Savannah children turn up regularly either in the police blotters nor in the area’s church rolls. This latter assertion may bring to mind the books, Christopher Grasso, Skepticism and American Faith: from the Revolution to the Civil War and Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith.
Part IV is titled “Binding Out As A Family/State Relation.” Beyond young children working, the average reader might be shocked to witness the casual governmental authority to disrupt families based on a general sense that they were not a proper family. “Binding out was in fact the state’s declaration and affirmation of what a “proper” household should look like, and masters were expected to provide such households to the children they took in.” (p. 149). In Chapter Ten, Jean B. Russo and J. Elliott Russo’s essay leads off with the perhaps surprising contention that, in colonial Maryland, local magistrates only bound out children when issues were brought to their attention; there was not formal investigation. This practice did not meet the English model, under the Poor Laws, for the local church parish church wardens, as Overseers of the Poor, to be active in this regard. One might have asked, though, whether Maryland’s start under a Catholic lord proprietor explains this practice.
In Chapter Eleven, Gilliam Hamilton writes about orphan apprentices in Montreal from 1794 to 1842. There, there was no local governmental authority or church authority seeking to indenture children. In Chapter Twelve, Holly Brewer confirms that Virginia’s magistrates and church wardens were active, unlike their counterparts in colonial Maryland. However, Dr. Brewer focused her paper on speculating that ideological changes explained her findings. While colonial magistrates in Virginia focused on maintaining properly patriarchal households by apprenticing poor and orphaned children, Dr. Brewer thinks a new view of childhood being distinct from adulthood, a byproduct of the Enlightenment and a growing sense that children should be educated, not put to work, impacted the decline in binding out apprentices in post-Revolutionary Virginia. Similarly, Dr. Brewer argues that Enlightenment ideas led to the sense of the importance of family bonds and public policies aimed at keeping birth families intact. “This pattern complements the conclusions of Nancy Cott, Linda Kerber, Michael Grossberg, and Ruth Bloch, who have argued that in the new republic, men and women began to be assigned sperate spheres, that the community became more separated from the family, and that motherhood began to be idolized.” (p. 197).
Professor Gloria L. Main added a conclusion that, frankly, does not add much. One might have expected a recap of the prior materials, along with a view to additional needed research and how these essays might lead to reconsideration of the period of covered. That does not take placed. Nonetheless, the book bears close readings by any student of early American history.
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