Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715-1919.

Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715-1919. By Karin L. Zipf. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 207. $42.95, ISBN 0-8071-3045-1.)

Traditional apprenticeship agreements--the kind that Benjamin Franklin famously broke when he fled Boston as a boy to make his fortune in Philadelphia--stipulated that boys would learn trades while they provided labor for their masters. The apprenticeships described in this book, however, considered apprentices to be simple laborers and were invoked if a parent was unable, in the opinion of the court, to take care of his or her son or daughter or if a child was orphaned and left without any visible means of support.

This study of the ways in which forced apprenticeships evolved to match attitudes about race, gender, and class clearly shows that freedom and childhood are constructs with fluid and often contradictory meanings. Karin L. Zipf traces that evolution through nearly two centuries and four major phases. During the first phase, which lasted from the early eighteenth century until well into the nineteenth century, the white patriarchy ensured that the children of single or widowed women of both races and of African American men would be subject to forced apprenticeship. The second phase developed in the 1850s, when the courts stepped up their efforts to limit the rights of black parents. Phase three, which took root during Reconstruction, generally eliminated race as a factor in determining which children were subject to apprenticeship but continued to discriminate against single mothers of both races. Through the first three phases, the courts insisted that the primary rights under consideration when a child's status was to be determined belonged either to the state or to the father. Beginning in the 1890s, "child savers" committed to the newfound notion that children also had rights replaced the creaky old apprenticeship system and its white patriarchy with a model of state paternalism that created a child welfare program comprising juvenile courts, a child labor law, and compulsory education.

Zipf effectively presents her primary themes: that "apprenticeship was a constantly evolving system of social control" and that "power relations in apprenticeship law were not static but rather constantly contested and reinterpreted by white and black North Carolinians" (p. 5). Along the way, she reveals the ways in which the blunt, inflexible language of the law and the heavy-handed intersection of race, gender, and legal systems were unequipped to deal with the subtleties of family dynamics and the varied needs of children.

This is, of course, a legal history, and the following suggestions may appear to be a case of wanting the author to have written a slightly different book. Be that as it may, Zipf could have enhanced the relevance of her book by integrating the evolution of the ways in which North Carolina judges, parents, and politicians constructed childhood between the early eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. She does a much better job of establishing changing ideas about race and gender. But the rich histories of children and of attitudes about childhood are generally missing. Nevertheless, this is a useful examination of the legal status of children and of parents that, indeed, "serves as a metaphor for power relations in nineteenth-century North Carolina" (p. 5).

JAMES MARTEN

Marquette University