Later-Life Realizations of Maryland’s Mid-Nineteenth-Century Pauper Apprentices

Abstract

Children Bound to Labor (2009) revealed the ubiquity and idiosyncratic nature of pauper apprenticeship across the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States. Despite local and regional differences, pauper apprenticeship served the three related purposes of poor relief, social control, and training for later-life economic independence. Most existing studies focus on whether and to what extent the system achieved the first two objectives. Less is known about later-life outcomes of pauper apprentices. This chapter offers insights into the system’s contribution to the third objective by linking more than 2700 young males apprenticed by family members and by poor relief administrators in Maryland between 1820 and 1860 to the federal censuses of 1860 and 1870. Compared to boys apprenticed by family members, pauper apprentices were indentured at younger ages, but they were otherwise promised similar training, education, and freedom dues during their apprenticeships. In later life, however, pauper apprentices were less likely to be literate and conditional on marriage had fewer children. There were small differences in skilled employment, wealth, and mobility. A second well-documented feature of pauper apprenticeship was its racialized implementation. Maryland’s poor blacks worked in less skilled occupations, were less literate, and amassed notably less wealth. If the system is to be judged by equitable treatment and sufficient training for later-life economic independence, it is not clear that the system succeeded. It took poor black children off the public dole but did not prepare them for more than scraping by in later life.

Appendix: Remembrance of John Murray

Though we met years earlier (at the 1994 EHA meetings in Cincinnati, if memory serves), I got to know John when he invited me to the Children Bound to Labor conference in Philadelphia in 2002. I joined John and Gillian Hamilton for dinner after the first day’s sessions where we discussed their papers. Their enthusiasm for the larger pauper apprentice project that was to become the book was infectious. They convinced me to collect the data from the Maryland archives that underlies my contribution to this volume. John would occasionally inquire into the status of my pauper project, and he always seemed dismayed that I let it languish. We had a friendly, professional, casual acquaintance. As was John’s wont, he sent kind notes of congratulation after he read one of my published papers, often with a prod to finish the pauper paper already.

John and I became friends when he submitted the manuscript that was to become The Origins of American Health Insurance to Yale University Press. He turned that early draft into a magnificent volume that deserved all the praise it received, and then some. But my lasting memory of John will be the kindness, generosity, and collegiality he showed me even while I worked on a series of papers that challenged one of his bedrock beliefs. He shared his data on the heights of Amherst College students knowing that I intended to use it in a line of study with which he fundamentally disagreed. Despite our disagreement on that issue, he invited me to Rhodes College. He offered insightful and useful comments on my paper, took me to dinner (Memphis barbeque, of course), and invited me to his home, which housed more books than some municipal libraries, where we shared a bottle of red wine sitting on his front porch on a warm spring Memphis evening. Once we agreed to disagree, we discussed the half-dozen books he was reading at the time. As I went back to my hotel, I knew that John and I were still friends. His deep respect for the academic enterprise and the value of friendship says a lot about the person – not the academic – John was.

I can finally say, “John, it’s done.” I regret that it is not in time to receive his kind note of congratulations on its publication.