{"id":280,"date":"2012-10-18T15:34:58","date_gmt":"2012-10-18T15:34:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=280"},"modified":"2014-02-12T19:38:53","modified_gmt":"2014-02-12T19:38:53","slug":"pauper-apprenticeship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=280","title":{"rendered":"CHILDREN BOUND TO LABOR: 18th and early 19th Century Home-Based Learning"},"content":{"rendered":"

Record:<\/strong> Ruth Wallis Herndon and John E. Murray, eds., Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America<\/a>\"\"<\/em>(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009)<\/p>\n

Summary: <\/strong>This book is the product of a long process of collaboration by a wide range of historians brought together by the Spencer Foundation under the leadership of educational historian John Rury.\u00a0 Herndon and Murray collaborated with 11 other researchers to produce a comprehensive and compelling look at the institution of pauper apprenticeships in North America from the colonial period until about 1850.\u00a0 Throughout this period, the most common way to educate children in dire circumstances was in the homes of more stable families.<\/p>\n

The 13 authors have chosen a range of population centers to capture the diversity of societies present in early America, and in each location they have looked intently at every record available on pauper apprenticeship.<\/p>\n

What is pauper apprenticeship?\u00a0 It was the dominant way most North American towns dealt with children who had lost their parents, been abandoned or abused, or were such a burden that their parents gave them up.\u00a0 In such situations local magistrates would write up indentures that spelled out a legal relationship between the poor child and a master.\u00a0 The master would provide the child\u2019s basic physical needs and teach the child knowledge and skills necessary for him or her to function as a contributing member of society in exchange for the child\u2019s labor.\u00a0 All in all the book catalogs and analyzes some 18,000 such contracts, and the results are fascinating.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s common for many today to hearken nostalgically back to the good old days when Americans were all happily nestled in large two-parent families full of piety, patriotism, and frontier independence.\u00a0 But it wasn\u2019t like that at all.\u00a0 Colonial government could be very invasive if families did not behave the way local officials felt they ought.\u00a0 In some cases, (as was the case with many children who became pauper apprentices) government could and would remove children by force from parents deemed unfit.\u00a0 As one source cited in this book put it, such children should be removed from the \u201cBriers and Rubbish\u201d of their biological families to be given a better chance at becoming productive citizens. (p.4)\u00a0 Furthermore, violence against these children was common and largely accepted.\u00a0 Such children\u2019s very existence testifies to the fact that the \u201cbreakdown of the family\u201d is nothing new.\u00a0 Thousands of these kids were declared \u201corphans\u201d even though they still had mothers.\u00a0 Many of them were born out of wedlock or to mothers whose husbands had run off to the West.<\/p>\n

The practice of putting poor children, by force if necessary, into male-headed homes was brought to the new world from the old and continued as the dominant charitable practice until the middle of the 19th century, when a host of new institutions like public schools and orphanages gradually took over.\u00a0 The institution of pauper apprenticeship allowed town magistrates to care for poor children without having to tax their citizens to do so.<\/p>\n

Once bound to a master, pauper apprentices were supposed to learn a trade and basic literacy.\u00a0 Sometimes this worked well, but other times the apprentice was treated as slave labor.\u00a0 At its best, boys picked up whatever trade the master practiced and were taught their ABCs, typically from the master\u2019s wife.\u00a0 Girls learned homemaking skills and literacy in the same way.\u00a0 Some boys received arithmetic training as well.\u00a0 But at its worst both boys and girls learned little more than ceaseless drudgery punctuated by haranguings and beatings.<\/p>\n

Though it varied widely from place to place, on average a child was bound out at about age seven and continued until \u201cmajority,\u201d which for boys was age 21 and for girls age 16 or 18.\u00a0 Black children were often bound out earlier and for longer periods, especially in slaveholding regions.\u00a0 Their contracts typically have less to say about education as well.<\/p>\n

These are some of the highlights from the introductory summary chapter.\u00a0 Let me close with a few interesting tidbits gleaned from some of the more focused studies of specific towns.<\/p>\n

T. Stephen Whitman\u2019s study of Baltimore and its environs found that the educational standards prescribed in contracts gradually increased for white girls as the 19th century wore on.\u00a0\u00a0 He describes three historical stages in pauper apprentice education.\u00a0 Early on, masters were charged with ensuring certain outcomes, such as literacy and the development of a specific trade skill.\u00a0 Later, specified outcomes were replaced by requirements specifying \u201cthe extent, timing, and content of education.\u201d\u00a0 These more formal requirements were increasingly found easier to be met by formal schooling, which explains the shift away from home-based training by the 1850s. Whitman summarizes, \u201cthe development of schools, orphanages, and juvenile prisons as educational institutions had, by the 1850s, largely eliminated the need for masters to school apprentices.\u201d (p.62)<\/p>\n

Adriana Van Zwieten\u2019s chapter on New Netherland provides several interesting anecdotes illustrating the wide range of practices masters employed to meet the educational requirements of their contracts.\u00a0 Many masters took care of their educational responsibilities at home, whether themselves or by hiring a tutor, but other sent their charges to night school, Sunday School, or some other formal institution.\u00a0 Zwieten notes that contracts were intentionally drafted to allow \u201cmasters and mistresses various options to fulfill the agreement.\u201d (93)<\/p>\n

Paul Lachance\u2019s chapter on New Orleans notes that all but three of the contracts he examined in that city specifically designated \u201cnight school\u201d as the institution to be used to impart literacy.\u00a0 He notes that despite the prescription, based on the evidence of signature rates, if children did not know how to read before they were apprenticed they likely wouldn\u2019t learn to do so under New Orleans masters.\u00a0 Literacy rates for white apprentices did improve after 1830.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because that was when New Orleans created public schools for white students.\u00a0 Poor kids could thus attend them for free and learn to read before they were bound to masters.\u00a0 Black children, however, were not allowed to attend these schools and their literacy rates remained low. (120)<\/p>\n

Holly Brewer\u2019s chapter on Virginia, probably my favorite in the book, ties both the decline in apprenticeship and the growth of public education in the 19th century to the ideology of Republicanism.\u00a0 Republican ideology was responsible in good measure for the shift in popular attitudes about childhood from the colonial notion of children as property to the modern understanding of children as persons.\u00a0 Similarly, Republicanism contributed to a hardening of the distinction between family and society, such that by the mid 19th century Americans increasingly viewed childhood as a distinct life stage that should be cherished and nurtured and viewed the family as an inviolable social unit prior to and superior to the larger society.\u00a0 Brewer provocatively writes,<\/p>\n

\u201csuch scholars as Christopher Lasch have their progression backwards when they clam that \u2018the history of modern society\u2026is the assertion of social control over activities once left to individuals or their families.\u2019\u201d (p.197)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the contrary, says Brewer,<\/p>\n

\u201cthe new republic, with the revision of laws and policies that accompanied the Revolution, accelerated the acceptance of certain elements of Enlightenment thought and saw the implementation of policies that tended to keep families together.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Said more simply, the idealization of the nuclear family that so many associate with Colonial Puritanism was actually more a product of the Enlightenment.<\/p>\n

Appraisal: <\/strong>In sum, this is a great book that offers much new material and analysis of its theme.<\/p>\n

Milton Gaither, Messiah College, author of Homeschool: An American History<\/a>\"\"<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Disclaimer<\/strong>:\u00a0 The views expressed in reviews are not the official views of ICHER or of its members.\u00a0 For more information about ICHER\u2019s Reviews, please see the \u00ab\u00a0About these Reviews \u00bb Section.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Record: Ruth Wallis Herndon and John E. Murray, eds., Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009) Summary: This book is the product of a long process of collaboration by a wide range … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[219,218,226,223,216,212,214,220,222,221,215,225,211,213,217,224],"class_list":["post-280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","tag-adriana-van-zwieten","tag-baltimore","tag-christopher-lasch","tag-holly-brewer","tag-indentures","tag-john-e-murray","tag-john-rury","tag-new-netherland","tag-new-orleans","tag-paul-lachance","tag-pauper-apprenticeship","tag-republicanism","tag-ruth-wallis-herndon","tag-spencer-foundation","tag-t-stephen-whitman","tag-virginia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1158,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions\/1158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}