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

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments This project began in 1998 with our first discussion of the fate of illegitimate children in colonial America. Over the intervening decade, the project has acquired many friends and many debts, rich evidence that it takes a community to produce a book. Institutional support gave this project its initial impetus, help along the way, and the final assist across the finish line. For a major grant we thank the Spencer Foundation, Chicago, where John Rury was our program officer. Herndon thanks the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium for a summer research grant. We both received sabbaticals from the Departments of History and Economics at the University of Toledo. Herndon thanks the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Massachusetts Historical Society for a long-term fellowship on a separate but related project; during that year in residence at MHS, she was able to see this book through its final phases while launching the new project. We both acknowledge financial support for publication from our universities, through Don Nieman and Roger Thibault at Bowling Green State University and Frank Calzonetti and Mike Dowd at the University of Toledo. Murray thanks his colleague Kris Keith for taking on advising duties for an extra year so he could work on this project. Most essays in this volume first appeared as papers presented at conferences organized specifically around the topic of pauper apprenticeship in early America . The first conference in September 2001 was hosted by the University of Toledo and underwritten by the Spencer Foundation. All attendees benefited x acknowledgments from the efficient work of Debbie MacDonald and Jeannie Stambaugh,both at the University of Toledo, in facilitating the gathering. The second conference in November 2002, jointly sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the Spencer Foundation,was facilitated especially well by Amy Baxter-Bellamy. We appreciate Daniel K. Richter’s scholarly collegiality in locating the conference at the McNeil Center and giving this project the benefit of a very productive hearing with Philadelphia-area scholars. We particularly thank Farley Grubb, Susan Klepp, and Stephanie Grauman Wolf, who served as commentators of the paper sessions. Several of the chapters appeared also as conference papers at the annual meetings of scholarly associations. At the Omohundro Institute meeting in Austin (1999), John Demos, Christine Daniels,and Stevie Wolf provided excellent comments . At the meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic in Baltimore (2001),Irene Q. Brown and Richard D. Brown gave detailed and insightful comments that significantly guided our editing. We also thank participants at the Social Science History Association meeting in Pittsburgh (2000). At key moments,colleagues lent their support by reminding us of the significance of these children bound to labor in the larger world of early American studies. Billy G. Smith, Lisa Wilson, Peter Potter, Cathy Matson, Lorena Walsh, Farley Grubb, and Howard Bodenhorn have been among the most stalwart and generous friends of this project,and we thank them for their advice and support in seeing this project to completion. Perhaps the ultimate test of a scholarly project’s worth is its reception in the classroom. Many of our students at the University of Toledo and Bowling Green State University read pauper apprenticeship contracts, listened to stories of children bound to labor, and wrote about the children and the system in helpful ways that helped us better understand the past. At the University of Toledo,Mary Patchen produced an excellent M.A. thesis on pauper apprentices in early Ohio; she also read a fine paper drawn from her thesis at the conference in Philadelphia . Although she chose not to include her essay in the book,we appreciate her work and are grateful for her collegial permission to cite and use her research. Karin L. Zipf and Barry Levy, who participated in this project in its early stages, gave us helpful feedback and insight into the system of binding out poor children in North Carolina and New England. Bill Pencak, Christine Daniels, and an anonymous reader for Cornell University Press gave us excellent and constructive criticism in their reports. Cornell University Press has been a pleasure to work with. We particularly appreciated the hard work of Peter Potter, Alison Kalett, Michael McGandy, Sara Ferguson, Karen Laun, and the production staff. We are grateful that our spouses, Jim Herndon and Lynn Wellage, were so understanding about the time away from home that this project took...