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

Herndon and Murray have assembled a fine collection of essays for this anthology, each complementary yet tightly focused on the subject of bound labor. Few collections offer the sense that the contributors are engaged with each other as well as with their readers. Their brief account of the anthology’s history in the acknowledgments for this volume explains that the essayists have interacted with one another for years. This mutual interest and awareness of each other’s subject matter is evident throughout.

Even the organization of the essays speaks to the book’s careful conception. The editors explain that the system of binding out can be divided into three categories: master–servant relations, parent–child relations, and family–state relations. The essays are divided accordingly, each one hewing closely to this organizing principle according to its category.

Of necessity, binding out can be studied closely only through community studies since it was, as the editors note, “a local institution” with immense variation. Hence, the authors delve deeply into court and other community records of indenture and apprenticeship in a variety of locations. Some of these communities are familiar to specialists in early American history—Maryland and New England, particularly—but this collection also includes examinations of Montreal, New Netherlands, Charleston, and New Orleans. The authors examine the regional variations and the subtle differences of experience that were determined not only by the expected categories of race and class but also by economic cycles, local mortality rates, and migration patterns. These studies are introduced by a provocative essay by the editors and a concluding one by Gloria Main that illuminate and contextualize the book’s themes.

All of the studies are clearly written, thoroughly researched, and devoid of jargon. Among the most rewarding are T. Stephen Whitman’s essay about nineteenth-century Maryland, which shows systems of apprenticeship and slavery flourishing side by side as flexible institutions adjusted to the demands of variable economic conditions, and Murray’s consideration of the children who moved in and out of the Charleston Orphan House. By studying the children in the context of their families, Murray reveals the institution’s permeability.