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chapter twelve Apprenticeship Policy in Virginia From Patriarchal to Republican Policies of Social Welfare holly brewer In February 1751 the churchwardens of Frederick County, Virginia, bound Hester Ryan,a month-old infant,to the man her mother had declared to be her father—Joseph Roberts. Her mother of the same name was already indentured to Roberts. Hester was apprenticed to him in lieu of his providing a guarantee to the parish that he would reimburse them if they had to pay for her nursing and care in her first few years of life. The churchwardens bound Hester without her mother’s consent. Instead of custody of her daughter, Hester’s mother received 25 lashes on her bare back. While Roberts could have paid a fine to let Hester avoid that lashing, he refused to help. When she finished her indenture, she had to leave her daughter behind.1 In fact, the courts left few illegitimate children with their mothers or even with their fathers unless, like Roberts, they were masters themselves. Masters often assumed custody of the illegitimate children born to their servants. The vestry book of Frederick County also gives numerous examples of infant bastard children supported by unrelated families, and the court records reveal that illegitimate children were bound as apprentices at an average age of barely four (4.4) years during the 1750s. Children whose fathers died with little property, if their mother had no broader family to rely on,were also bound soon after their father’s deaths. “Poor”children,when their families turned to the county or vestry for relief, were quickly apprenticed, at an average age of 6.6 years during the same decade. All in all, 7.3 percent of all children were bound as apprentices in Frederick County during the 1750s, many at a very young age. 184 children bound to labor Apprenticeship in colonial Virginia, and especially in Frederick County, was both a way of accessing and controlling children’s labor, at the same time that it was the main welfare policy. While it was exploitative—indeed,in its treatment of the poor, it bears some resemblance to hereditary slavery—it was not simply the thirst for labor in early Virginia that shaped this institution. Taking apprenticeship seriously means taking hereditary status seriously in early Virginia, but it also means understanding how patriarchal ideas about family structure shaped the household in the colonial period, such that masters often replaced parents,even for white children. The years after the Revolutionary War marked a decline in masters’ patriarchal authority—at least over white children—and a new emphasis both on educating children and parental custody. These new emphases on education and parental custody (for both fathers and mothers) reveal the influence of republican political ideology, which challenged the patriarchal household just as it challenged the patriarchal power of kings. Likewise, children ’s education—rather than their training and work—became seen as more important in opening avenues for their future equality. It became less acceptable to see white children born to a permanent lowly status. Thus the percentage of white children apprenticed declined sharply. Richard Morris and William Rorabaugh, among others, have linked the declining use of apprenticeship in the early nineteenth century—both poor apprenticeship and trade apprenticeship—to a declining demand for bound labor in general,and children’s labor in particular,as a result of industrialization.2 There are several problems with applying their argument to this case. First, in Virginia,the demand for bound labor continued to be strong through the mid– nineteenth century. The argument for a general decline in interest in bound labor applies better in the North. Second, Frederick County between 1750 and 1820 was mostly rural and had no direct industrialization yet experienced a sharp decline in poor apprenticeship. Third, the argument that demand for children’s labor was declining has been challenged by broad studies that show continuing demand for children’s labor throughout the industrial period.3 Instead, I suggest that changed attitudes about who should have custody of children,how wealth should be distributed,and when and how it was appropriate for children to be put to work facilitated changes in social welfare policy in the years following the Revolution. One of the changes that accompanied the Revolution was an increased idealization of the bonds between children and their natural parents, particularly their mothers. Thus, more effort was made to keep children with their natural parents, mostly through transfer payments. A...

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