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14. Class Stratification and Children’s Work in Post-Revolutionary Urban America
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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14 Class Stratification and Children’s Work in Post-Revolutionary Urban America Sharon Braslaw Sundue Early in the 1790s, a fourteen-year-old servant named Benjamin Hannis recognized an opportunity to run away from his mistress, Catherine Keppele, and he took it. Benjamin was unlucky; he was recaptured, and authorities committed him to jail, no doubt regarding the circumstances as rather unremarkable. But Hannis’s case was appealed to the state supreme court, where the justices declared Benjamin’s indenture void, concluding remarkably that no parent or guardian under any circumstances could make his child a servant in Pennsylvania.1 Historians typically cite this case to analyze the changing meaning of child custody at the turn of end of the eighteenth century.2 Court debates in this case also reveal attitudes toward child training and nurture at a moment when North Americans placed new emphasis on education to train citizens for the responsibility of political consent .3 Justice Bradford, for one, explained that an indenture “by which the infant is bound to serve, and not to learn any trade, occupation, or labour, cannot be supported upon the principles of common law, nor by the express words of any statute.”4 Bradford faced the tricky task of accounting for the “custom of the country,” which had tolerated the servitude of minors for nearly two centuries . Ignoring history, Bradford argued that such “instances” had not been “general.” All of the early laws had referred exclusively “to imported servants only” and thus were merely “founded on necessity.” In his opinion, “no such necessity existed as to the children who were already in the province.” In fact, Bradford implied a youthful servant would be “in a very degraded situation,” “a species of property, holding a middle rank between slaves and freemen.”5 Bradford and the other justices left open the possibility that for certain “classes” of children, servitude could be justified in terms of “necessity.” Justice James Shippen agreed that a parent could not transfer the right to his children’s personal service “for money paid to himself” but argued that he might transfer that right and “may possibly bind them as servants” “where the covenants appear on the face of them to be beneficial to the child.” The “beneficial” labor contracts he referred to applied primarily to “poor and indigent ” children, who by virtue of involuntary indenture, would be saved from “being bought up meanly, and in habits of idleness and vice.”6 The judges did not elaborate what “beneficial” training for the poorest children would require; did revolutionary concern for education extend to their indentures as well? The actual magnitude of change needs to be tested by considering the vocational experiences of children at the bottom end of the social scale. What actually happened to poor children in the postRevolutionary period? Was there, in fact, a new concern for their vocational education? This chapter compares efforts to “train” poor children in the aftermath of the War of Independence in three North American cities: Boston, Charleston, and Philadelphia. By analyzing vocational education, it explores a key mechanism Weber identified as constructing social class boundaries, both economically and culturally.7 Elite efforts to afford the poor an education were also an important indicator of their desire to institutionalize status differences. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of research on the kind of instruction provided to poor children in the guise of pauper apprenticeship during the late colonial and early national periods.8 Ruth Herndon argued that pauper apprenticeship was“profoundly conservative,”preserving status distinctions based on class, gender, and race.9 This chapter builds on that insight, highlighting the ways in which the administration of poor relief and the construction of race and class intersected in a profoundly local way. It argues that poor children’s access to more than basic education was contingent on particular local demands for labor, and that it intersected with the desire of elites to perpetuate specific social hierarchies.10 Differences in efforts to train poor children thus underscore the disparate impact of class, race, and gender in late eighteenth-century North America.11 In Boston in the postwar period, elites followed the colonial model for training the children of the poor, relying upon the publicly administered apprenticeship system. In fact, the city’s Overseers of the Poor placed children in involuntary apprenticeships throughout the war, with only a brief hiatus. Placement during the war years reflected wartime disruption in Boston; the overseers sent most poor boys...