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chapter two Recreating Proper Families in England and North America Pauper Apprenticeship in Transatlantic Context steve hindle and ruth wallis herndon The American colonies did not invent the practice of binding out poor children ; they inherited it. From the early 1600s until well into the 1800s, local authorities in both England and North America regarded pauper apprenticeship as an acceptable, even a desirable, way to raise the children of the poor. Communities on both sides of the Atlantic shared similar assumptions about the powers of the local authorities—to decide whether a poor family was able to maintain its children;to identify (and to negotiate terms with) an appropriate master;to place the child in the master’s home. There were,however,significant differences in the development of pauper apprenticeship in England and North America. Most striking is that whereas English contracts tended to emphasize the master’s responsibility to keep the child off poor relief, American contracts tended to emphasize the master’s responsibility to train the child in both work and literacy skills. In this chapter, we show how this and other ideas about pauper apprenticeship persisted or disappeared in North America, as American magistrates adapted the practice to their own particular needs. In England, parish apprenticeship had developed as part of a centuries-old effort to manage poverty and poor relief at the local level, and its principal purpose remained that of alleviating the burden that an orphaned or impoverished child represented to the local taxpayers. Printed forms became common in England only in the eighteenth century, but both print and manuscript indentures almost invariably included among the master’s obligations a standard phrase revealing this purpose. A typical clause stated that the master should “so provide for the said Apprentice, that he be not any way a Charge to the said 20 children bound to labor Parish, or Parishioners of the same; but of and from all Charge shall and will save the said Parish and Parishioners harmless and indemnified during the said Term.”1 In this respect,pauper apprenticeship in England represented an adaptation of the feudal system: as R. H. Tawney put it, “The poor laws began where villeinage ended.”2 American magistrates also worried about poor relief, but the contracts they devised indicate that preparing poor children for a useful adulthood remained the dominant rationale for binding out. Many poor children were raised outside their birth homes, but without the protection of a legal indenture. When children were legally bound, the contracts stressed practical education (for the child) and labor (for the master). American indentures rarely stipulated the master’s obligation to keep the child off poor relief but almost always stipulated the master’s obligation to provide skill training and literacy education, however minimal. In this respect, American pauper apprenticeship was less like typical English parish apprenticeship and more like the formal craft apprenticeships that had governed entry to trade guilds in England since the medieval period. The American colonies shared with England neither the history of pauper apprenticeship nor the economic context in which the practice arose. The practice was transported there by the earliest English colonists as an already accepted element of their cultural heritage. When Anglo-Americans turned to pauper apprenticeship, they did so with one eye on the aspirations of a colonial future—educating the descendants of reform-minded colony-makers; managing race relations with indigenous people bowed by military conquest and with involuntary migrants from Africa and the Caribbean; and supplying cheap manpower in a labor-hungry economy. Most of the case studies presented in this volume consider the practice of binding out poor children in colonies and states of English origin. They were English administrative units,in which political authority flowed from the kingin -parliament, English language and culture dominated, and English precedent formed the basis for law and legal custom. It is, therefore, imperative to understand the system of pauper apprenticeship as it developed in England in order to appreciate the attitudes and conventions that undergirded Anglo-American apprenticeship. This essay is a first, tentative step in the direction of a genuinely comparative history of social welfare policy as it was transmitted to British North America (see table 2.1). The English North American colonies were established and their laws codi- fied between the 1610s and the 1720s at the very time that statutory parish relief of the poor, including the compulsory apprenticeship of pauper children, was emerging in England from a traditional...

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