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

Virtually all children worked in early America. Only a minority—usually "orphans" whose fathers were dead, absent, or unable to care for them—were bound by formal contracts that pledged children's labor for a term of years in return for their maintenance, vocational training, a modicum of academic instruction, and, in some cases, the promise of freedom dues. Even those who were so bound were scarcely united by the circumstance, for pauper apprenticeship reflected local economic needs and pervasive social assumptions; it meant different things for girls and for boys, for white children and for children of color, for northerners and for southerners. Each contract was slightly different. Nevertheless, the broad parameters of pauper apprenticeship vividly evoke what community leaders believed was due to ordinary children in early America.

The dozen essays in this volume sweep from Montreal to New Orleans, considering pauper apprenticeship in British and Dutch colonial contexts and in the early national United States. Editors Ruth Herndon and John Murray offer three models for interpreting pauper apprenticeship, as a master/servant, parent/ child, and family/state relationship, and the essays are loosely categorized under these headings. In fact, many of the essays ask essentially the same questions—Which children were bound? At what age? By whom? To what trades? With how much provision for literacy?—about different regional data sets. The book's structure emphasizes the intense localism of pauper apprenticeship, which was not so much a "system" as a long-standing folk practice that sundry communities employed in slightly different forms. Unfortunately, the emphasis on localism obscures aspects of pauper apprenticeship that transcended region. For this reason, the two synthetic overviews, Ruth Herndon and John Murray's essay on raising children in pauper apprenticeship and especially Steven Hindle and Ruth Herndon's essay on the trans-Atlantic roots of pauper apprenticeship, are especially valuable.

Herndon, Murray, and several contributors argue persuasively that pauper apprenticeship is worthy of historians' close attention. Until the mid-nineteenth century, it was Americans' primary method of caring for orphaned and indigent children. Its reach was vast—Holly Brewer estimates that in the 1750s, 7.3% of white children in Frederick County, Virginia, one child in fourteen, were bound as pauper apprentices (p. 189). Moreover, apprenticeship contracts provide us with a unique window onto early American values about childrearing. It comes as no surprise that children were bound to labor, but what, at a minimum, did the community owe a child in return? The essays in this volume suggest that overseers of the poor sought to provide pauper children with sustenance and vocational training that would allow them to maintain, though probably not improve, the social status to which they had been born. Most apprentices were promised a little schooling, enough to acquire basic literacy, and some, chiefly boys, were given opportunities to master writing, arithmetic, and specialized trades. Girls were bound out less often than boys and for shorter terms; they were considered functionally adult a few years before their brothers were.

Many of the essays in Children Bound to Labor seek to uncover how apprenticeship worked by quantitative analysis of almshouse records and apprenticeship contracts. The data sets are inevitably small, rendering the quantitative approach only partially successful. Even if one assumes that masters honored the terms of the contracts they signed, the contracts included many provisions that were open to interpretation. Teaching a child to read might mean teaching him to sound out words in the hymnal, or it might encompass rigorous instruction that would equip him to interpret newspapers, legal documents, and the works of Shakespeare. Teaching a boy husbandry might mean employing him as unskilled farm labor for several years, or it might mean systematically training him to manage a farm of his own. It's hard to ascertain how pauper children fared simply by analyzing apprenticeship contracts.

The most illuminating essays in Children Bound...