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  • Rediscovering the Lost City of Early American Welfare
  • Barry Levy (bio)
Ruth Wallis Herndon and John E. Murray, eds., Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. x + 264 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95 (paper).

This book contains thirteen original essays that analyze the way many poor children lived in North American colonies and/or states. The essays uncover the existence of sophisticated welfare systems.

Welfare history is hardly a popular focus among early American historians. In one of the two overview essays Ruth Herndon and the English historian Steve Hindle note, "the historical literature on pauper apprenticeship indentures in England is rich, and . . . this book, by contrast, represents only the beginning of the literature for North America, which might profitably follow the agenda set by poor law historians in the United Kingdom" (p. 28). The poor-law history enterprise in England is admirable. English historians like Hindle have placed the transformation of the parish from a religious institution into a largely state welfare institution at the center of their discussions of the emergence of the state and modernity in early modern England and at the core of the character of the British people.1 Welfare plays no role in current narratives of early American history.

Perhaps to overcome early Americanists' indifference, Herndon and Murray marshal aggregation and systematization. The focus of all these essays is the pauper-apprenticeship contract, a nearly standardized document. Herndon and Murray note that historians of localities have seen these documents, but that the "extent of the institution" could not be glimpsed until these scholars brought their work together (p. 2). The thirteen historians find and discuss some 18,000 pauper-apprenticeship contracts, revealing a city of poor children larger in population than the city of Boston at any time before the American Revolution.

The first two essays also offer a guide to conceptualize present and future research. Throughout the colonies and states, it is argued, magistrates used state pauper-apprentice contracts to move children at risk from troubled to proper households where the children would gain nurturance and life skills [End Page 414] in exchange for their labor. The contracts often specify the details of the exchanges that these historians statistically analyze. Furthermore, as Herndon and the English historian Steve Hindle argue in the second essay, the American pauper-apprenticeship system was a transplantation of the English pauper-apprenticeship system developed in parishes and city corporations from the 1601 poor law. However, in America, forms of governance varied colony by colony, and even within colonies, as opposed to the national parish system of England. Nonetheless, these historians argue, "from the early eighteenth century on the English and American trajectories began to converge. Parish apprenticeships began a spectacular rise in North America and became fully institutionalized, indeed even ubiquitous, in England" (pp. 34-35). Herndon and Hindle argue that the pauper-apprenticeship system was more encompassing in North America than in England, because in England "it is entirely possible that substantial numbers of boys and girls were bound out informally, leaving no trace at all in the archival record." This was not true in America, they argue. "For this reason," note Herndon and Hindle, "it is unlikely that the chronology of the rise and decline of pauper apprenticeship in eighteenth-century England will ever be charted with the kind of precision that is possible in the American colonies, where the practice remained much more closely governed by and recorded in formal indentures" (p. 35).

In truth, the aggregations and essays suggest that no coherent state-sponsored "pauper-apprenticeship system" existed in North America and that the child welfare problems in North America then, as now, were varied—though no less telling for being so.

Herndon and Murray argue that a pauper child-apprenticeship system included oversight of most poor families and their children, state intervention to remove and place children in identified host families, and oversight of children in host families. While the essays show that most of the colonies and states studied used state-sponsored or overseen apprentice contracts to handle many poor children, they also assert other strategies were probably more...

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