In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chapter eight The Extent and Limits of Indentured Children’s Literacy in New Orleans, 1809–1843 paul lachance Literacy is a special dimension of the general topic of children bound to labor in early America. The studies in this book reveal that removing poor children from their natal home and placing them in another household or institution where they were expected to work was as variable a practice as it was ubiquitous . In some settings, it was little more than a means to supply employers with cheap labor from a particularly vulnerable element of the population and offered scant protection from exploitation or abuse. In other situations, it represented a genuine attempt to provide children of the poor with skills and opportunities that their own parents could not or were not likely to provide. Whether or not the court orders or legal contracts binding children out to other households stipulated literacy training is one indication of the potential impact of pauper apprenticeship on children’s lives. In places where children were asked to indicate by a mark or signature their acceptance of terms specified in the legal documents by which they were bound, it is possible to measure and analyze their literacy directly. Over a thousand indentures made in New Orleans in the early nineteenth century provide such data. They were endorsed by three parties: the person who was bound, in most cases a child; his or her sponsor, usually a parent but not always; and the master or employer. Their signatures, or marks in lieu of a signature, are all that is needed to measure literacy. Calculate the proportion of persons who could sign their names, and you have an indication of the ability to read and write.1 Secondly, clauses in over half of indentures promising from two to forty months of schooling offer a means of measuring the importance placed on 120 children bound to labor literacy training by parties to the agreement. In all but three of those that speci- fied how it was to be provided, it was at night school. Masters very rarely allowed time off from work to attend school. The phrasing of educational clauses often gave basic literacy as the goal to be achieved. Since 44 percent of provisions for schooling were for children already capable of signing their indentures, they suggest that signature rates provide an optimistic estimate of acquisition of competence in reading and writing. Investigation of popular literacy in New Orleans through the indentures responds to the need for analysis of children’s literacy where evidence exists. In a 1990 survey of studies of literacy from 1630 to 1840,the author remarked that studies of “literacy among children and young teens are virtually nonexistent.”2 Since then, the subject has begun to receive attention, but more case studies are needed to expand the base for answering basic questions about the acquisition of literacy before compulsory primary education of virtually everyone in public schools.3 What proportion of children learned to read and write in the pre-public-school era? At what age? Where? In the home, in church-run schools, or in private tuition–based schools? Where various methods of transmitting literacy existed side by side, what was their relative importance? What roles did the mother and father play in the literacy training of their children? How much did race, class, and gender differences affect transmission of literacy and illiteracy from one generation to the next? Did public schools attenuate their effect? In their absence, did clauses in apprenticeship contracts requiring the master to provide basic education contribute to the same result?4 This chapter addresses these questions with the New Orleans indentures. It will show that popular literacy was relatively widespread in New Orleans, among adults and children. By age fifteen, about three-fifths of apprentices could sign their indentures. Since that proportion did not change in the later teen years, it seems that if children had not learned to write by age fifteen, they would never learn to do so. Girls were less likely than boys of the same age to sign their names, but the difference was small. As in other studies, the mother seems to have played a greater role than the father in the acquisition of literacy by the child prior to apprenticeship. The establishment of the first public schools in New Orleans in the middle of the period covered by the indentures (1809 to 1843) provides a possible explanation of why literacy...

Share