Fri Sep 29 21:14:56 EDT 2006
Published by EH.NET (September 2006)
Karin L. Zipf, _Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North
Carolina, 1715-1919_. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2005. xi + 207 pp. $43 (cloth), ISBN: 0-8071-3045-1.
Reviewed for EH.NET by T. Stephen Whitman, Department of History,
Mount St. Mary's University.
Karin Zipf, of East Carolina University, provides in _Labor of
Innocents_ valuable insights into North Carolinians' evolving views
on the respective roles of the state and of women, African Americans,
and poor whites in raising, educating, and controlling children and
youth. Zipf focuses her attention on the social and political aspects
of apprenticeship, surveying its trajectory from eighteenth-century
origins to its eventual replacement in the early twentieth century by
child welfare agencies and juvenile justice systems. She is not as
concerned with apprenticeship as an economic or labor institution.
The greatest strength of this book lies in a meticulous and
thoughtful appraisal of the legislative and judicial history of
apprenticeship in North Carolina. Historians accustomed to thinking
of apprenticeship as having died out in the Early Republic will
profit from Zipf's focus on the period between 1850 and 1919. She
identifies four significant "period shifts" (p. 155). Initially used
primarily to monitor poor women in single-parent households, North
Carolinians began to apply court-ordered apprenticeship to free
people of color in the 1850s. In the wake of the Civil War, former
slaveholders attempted to use apprenticeship to control the children
of ex-slaves. Struggles between planters and freedpeople, mediated by
North Carolina's Reconstruction governments, led to a second
redefinition of apprenticeship. Up to this point, courts and
legislators regarded parental rights to control children as
inviolable, but had effectively excluded poor women and free blacks
from recognition as legal parents. The 1867 reforms in apprenticeship
law extended parental recognition to African-American men, and
acknowledged somewhat wider rights of control for women, as well.
But in the 1890s, a third shift occurred, as appellate courts granted
judges wider discretion to assess the fitness of parents to control
their children, based on tests of "good character." This tendency
culminated in a fourth shift of policy with the passage of a Child
Welfare Act ion 1919 and the statutory elimination of apprenticeship.
Over the long run, the state switched from delegating control and
surveillance of poor children to apprentice masters and private
orphanages to assuming direct responsibility for children's welfare
via modern bureaucratic management.
The book's focus on elites' efforts to control socially marginal
people and their children puts Zipf in the same part of the
historiographical forest as Peter Bardaglio's _Reconstructing the
Household_, Victoria Bynum's _Unruly Women_, and Laura Edwards' _
Gendered Strife and Confusion_. All of these authors insist that
gender issues, as well as race, informed the laws and practices aimed
at poor people in the nineteenth-century South. Zipf's work, with its
tight concentration on apprenticeship, operates more narrowly than
Bardaglio et al., but does give us a deeper look at the institution,
at least as a vehicle for social control.
Some readers will wish to know more about the labor aspects of
apprenticeship in North Carolina. Zipf examined apprenticeship
records from seven counties in the state, selected to provide a mix
of urban and rural settings from the coastal plain, the piedmont, and
the western hill country. She uses the data to demonstrate increasing
and disproportionate apprenticing of free black children in the 1840s
and 1850s, but might have analyzed these indentures more deeply. It
would be useful to know in more detail the age distributions of
children at time of indenture, the crafts to which they were bound,
and the kinds of economic promises made to apprentices. The latter
might include how much education the apprentice was to receive or
what kinds of goods or amounts of cash were to be paid upon
completion of the indenture, and the extent to which these promises
varied over time, or according to the race, sex, and age of the
apprentice. Providing such a detailed analysis would help determine
the extent to which economic forces, as distinct from social control
motives, entered into the binding of children, and how these forces
interacted.
But one does not wish to commit the reviewer's sin of wishing the
author had written a different book. Karin Zipf set out to explain
the form, content, and evolution of North Carolina elites' impulses
to control the poor around them, and she has accomplished her task
ably. Anyone interested in the social and cultural history of
childhood will profit from reading _Labor of Innocents_.
T. Stephen Whitman is an Associate Professor of History at Mount St.
Mary's University, Emmitsburg, Maryland, who writes about slavery and
emancipation. He is the author of _At Freedom's Door: Challenging
Slavery in the Chesapeake_, forthcoming in 2007 from the Press at the
Maryland Historical Society.
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