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.
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Notes
- 1.
The scale is created such that 1 = laborer, 2 = operative, 3 = skilled artisan, 4 = farmer, and 5 = clerical. Boys indentured without a listed occupation were coded as no occupation = 0.
- 2.
Instead of using the 100-point occupational rank (socioeconomic index) values, developed on relative occupational prestige circa 1950 and based on narrow occupational definitions, that are included in the IPUMS data sets, I categorized occupations on a five-point scale: 1 = common or unskilled laborers, 2 = semiskilled operatives, 3 = skilled artisans, 4 = farmers (not farm laborers = 1), and 5 = professionals and clerks. Those listed without occupation are coded as zero.
- 3.
A transition matrix of the 1860 census yields similar results and is not reported.
- 4.
A handful of former apprentices moved to San Francisco, California, presumably in response to the gold rush, and a few moved as far west as St. Louis, Missouri, and one to Goliad County, Texas. These very long distances are dropped from the diagram, but not from the calculations of mean and median distances.
- 5.
Bodenhorn (2015) reports marked differences in outcomes for blacks and mixed-race individuals in the pre-Civil War South. Preliminary estimates of the equations included separate terms for black and mixed-race individuals indicate that mixed-race apprentices fared better than blacks in most outcomes, but the coefficients were not statistically different in any equation. For ease of reporting and interpretation, the reported regressions include all black and mixed in a single category.
- 6.
- 7.
The models were also estimated using annual Baltimore alms house admissions per capita as an instrument to measure the incidence of poverty, which should place more children at risk of pauper apprenticeship (Baltimore City 1843–1854; Rockman 2009). The alms house data are available for fewer years, which reduces the 1870 regressions to 366 observations, so the results are not tabulated. The second-stage results are comparable to those reported in Table 10.8a, b. The alms house variable is marginally significant in every regression but one and the likelihood-ratio test statistics are significant at p < 0.001 in every case.
- 8.
Except for children, which is estimated using the -etpoisson command in Stata, the models are estimated using the -etregress command, so that the second-stage equations for dichotomous independent variables are linear probability models.
- 9.
Although the likelihood-ratio test does not provide compelling evidence of a selection effect, the p-value on the test statistic is close to standard levels of significance, so the selection-corrected estimates are reported. The marginal effects generated by probit estimation were not qualitatively different.
- 10.
Donohue III and Heckman (1991) document comparable occupational segregation in southern textile mills in the early twentieth century.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Pam Bodenhorn for exceptional research assistance and the late Lois Green Carr for her assistance in locating and interpreting some of the materials on pauper apprentices.
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Appendix: Remembrance of John Murray
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.
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Bodenhorn, H. (2022). Later-Life Realizations of Maryland’s Mid-Nineteenth-Century Pauper Apprentices. In: Gray, P., Hall, J., Wallis Herndon, R., Silvestre, J. (eds) Standard of Living. Studies in Economic History. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06477-7_10
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