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

The history of early America cannot be told without considering unfree labor. At the center of this history are African and Native American adults forced into slavery; the children born to these unfree persons usually inherited their parents' status. Immigrant indentured servants, many of whom were young people, are widely recognized as part of early American society. Less familiar is the idea of free children being taken from the homes where they were born and put into bondage. As Children Bound to Labor makes clear, pauper apprenticeship was an important source of labor in early America. The economic, social, and political development of the colonies and then the states cannot be told properly without taking them into account. Binding out pauper apprentices was a widespread practice throughout the colonies from Massachusetts to South Carolina-poor, illegitimate, orphaned, abandoned, or abused children were raised to adulthood in a legal condition of indentured servitude. Most of these children were without resources and often without advocates. Local officials undertook the responsibility for putting such children in family situations where the child was expected to work, while the master provided education and basic living needs. The authors of Children Bound to Labor show the various ways in which pauper apprentices were important to the economic, social, and political structure of early America, and how the practice shaped such key relations as master-servant, parent-child, and family-state in the young republic. In considering the practice in English, Dutch, and French communities in North America from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, Children Bound to Labor even suggests that this widespread practice was notable as a positive means of maintaining social stability and encouraging economic development. Contributors: Monique Bourque, Willamette University; Holly Brewer, North Carolina State University; Gillian Hamilton, University of Toronto; Ruth Wallis Herndon, Bowling Green State University; Steve Hindle, University of Warwick; Paul Lachance, University of Ottawa; Timothy J. Lockley, University of Warwick; Gloria L. Main, University of Colorado, Boulder; John E. Murray, University of Toledo; Jean B. Russo, Historic Annapolis Foundation; Jean Elliott Russo, independent scholar; Adriana E. van Zwieten, Biographical Dictionary of Pennsylvania Legislators; T. Stephen Whitman, Mount St. Mary's University

About the Author :
Ruth Herndon is Associate Professor of History at Bowling Green State University. She is the author of Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England. John Murray is Professor of Economics at University of Toledo. He is the author of Origins of American Health Insurance: A History of Industrial Sickness Funds.

Review :
"Ruth Wallis Herndon and John E. Murray have gathered together twelve fine essays in this volume that provides welcome insight into the varied apprenticeship practices on display in North America from the late seventeenth century through the mid nineteenth. Children Bound to Labor demonstrates that apprenticeship was a pervasive and remarkably flexible institution that could be adapted to fit divergent political and economic contexts in early America."-Georgia Historical Quarterly "This excellent collection brings together a dozen essays that explore the history and significance of pauper apprenticeship (also known as orphan apprenticeship or binding out). Most of the essays are based on detailed research in the records and circumstances of particular communities; they focus on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and range across North America, mainly in the British colonies but with interesting essays on New Netherland and Montreal as well. Taken together, these essays do much to advance our knowledge of the institution, and they make a convincing cases for its importance to our understanding of early American culture and development, including the central issues of labor, poverty, ideas about child rearing, society, and the state, and the effects of economic and social changes."-Helena M. Wall, Journal of Southern History "This book has been needed badly for a long time. While children comprised approximately half of all Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most scholars have given them scant attention. Children Bound to Labor is easily the best, most comprehensive study of early American childhood. It will appeal to every reader interested either in early America or in the history of childhood."-Billy G. Smith, Distinguished Professor of Letters and Science, Montana State University, author of Class Matters "Children Bound to Labor offers an unsurpassed vivid portrait of how thousands of otherwise free children became vulnerable members of early American society. Struck by the unfortunate circumstances of illegitimate birth, abandonment, or abuse, these children were bound out to work in the families of strangers everywhere in early America. Herndon and Murray have brought together a superior group of scholars whose research in pauper records presents a compelling and gracefully presented account of how communities struggled to define what it meant to 'govern' and 'properly parent' pauper children."-Cathy Matson, University of Delaware, author of Merchants and Empire and Union of Interests "The essays in Children Bound to Labor should be read by all social historians for their new findings about childhood, poverty, and work in early America. This important and unique collection offers transnational and cross-regional insights into parent-child, family-state, and master-servant relationships in North America from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries."-Christopher Clark, University of Connecticut, author of Social Change in America