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

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.