Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America (review)

This collection of essays invites readers to consider an important but neglected topic of American history: the binding-out system of child labor commonly practiced in North America from colonial settlement until the mid-nineteenth century. Distinct from slavery, indentured servitude, and traditional craft apprenticeship, the binding out of poor children to masters—known as “pauper apprenticeship”—represented a convergence of varying interests and purposes in early American communities. To begin with, pauper apprenticeship was a labor arrangement from which nearly every community benefited economically. Bound-out children labored for their masters until they reached adulthood, which typically meant twenty one years of age for boys and sixteen or eighteen for girls. Pauper apprenticeships were also understood as substitutions for parent–child relationships. Thus, the contracts governing these apprenticeships required masters to provide for the daily maintenance and education of bound-out children along with eventual payment for the children’s labor. Finally, pauper apprenticeship served a civil function. Local officials used the binding-out system to rescue poor, orphaned, or abandoned children who otherwise might have ended up on “poor relief.” The contracts that governed pauper apprenticeships were thus regulated by civil authorities whose views reflected official notions of order and “proper” family life. What resulted from this mélange of interests was an institution that, while local in certain regards, was fairly uniform and widely recognizable to early Americans.

This volume brings together studies of individual communities in an attempt to reveal the common elements of the institution and to convey its vast extent in early America. As editors Ruth Wallis Herndon and John E. Murray state in their overview, pauper apprenticeship “was everywhere” (p. 2). Indeed, Herndon and Murray suggest at one point that the institution “may have functioned in some places as a system of bound labor second only in importance to slavery” (p. 18). Based on an impressive eighteen thousand surviving contracts to bind out children, the essays in this volume are arranged topically according to the three different kinds of relationships embodied in the binding-out system. A pair of incisive introductory essays is followed by a section of essays that explores binding out as a master/servant relation, a middle section that focuses on binding out as a parent/child relation, and a final section that examines what the binding-out system revealed about the family/state relation in early America.

One of the important contributions of this volume is to expand our view of labor and the economy in early America to encompass children. Especially illuminating is an essay by T. Stephen Whitman that explores child apprenticeship in nineteenth-century Maryland. Analyzing the binding out of children in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, Whitman emphasizes the flexibility of pauper apprenticeship as an economic and social institution. He argues that like slavery, pauper apprenticeship was not an obstacle to capitalism. Rather, this ostensibly pre-modern institution “could be articulated and rearticulated in ways suitable to capitalism’s advance” (70). Another important contribution is the discovery that pauper apprenticeship helped to preserve the hierarchies of American society. Child apprenticeship, Ruth Herndon notes, was “designed to maintain the status quo” (51). In a similar vein, John Murray demonstrates how an antebellum Charleston Orphan House served to “maintain racial unity” among whites in Charleston (p. 118), and Jean B. Russo and J. Elliott Russo argue that colonial justices’ treatment of orphans in two eastern shore counties of Maryland amounted to providing children with “education and training suitable to their status” (153). These essays suggest that as an institution in early America, pauper apprenticeship was far from politically or ideologically neutral. Indeed, historians may have much to learn about the maintenance of social hierarchy in early America by looking at pauper apprenticeship.

If only because of its utter neglect...