| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.2

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.2 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715–1919. By Karin L. Zipf (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. xi plus 207 pp.).

Under colonial American custom and law, apprenticeship was both a means by which one generation passed skilled crafts to the next and a means by which court-approved parental substitutes raised poor, and especially fatherless, children. Each type of apprenticeship was distinct. Whereas parents privately contracted with masters for craft apprenticeships, which required that youths be given an education and taught a trade, poor children under court-ordered apprenticeships did not necessarily get an education and could be assigned to such "trades" as housewifery, which might qualify poor girls to become house servants. By the 1830s formal indented craft apprentices were increasingly rare in the United States, but the courts, often without regard to parental opinion, continued to bind poor free boys and girls as "apprentices." Not surprisingly, actual practices also often involved race and gender issues. In Maryland and Delaware "apprenticeship" had been used in conjunction with widespread voluntary manumission in the 1790s and early 1800s as a device to retain social control of young African Americans, and before the Civil War poor free black parents in the South often had their children bound without consent. When slavery ended in 1865, planters tried to impose a new system of apprenticeship on their youthful ex-slaves.

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