Apprenticeship

As the main path to the acquisition of a skill in the early modern world, apprenticeship was an important custom throughout the colonial American and early national period. Although the institution continued to be the main means of attaining a skill, changes in the early American economy, the Revolution, and the experience of new nationhood diminished the importance of apprenticeship and, by the nineteenth century, it was less vital than ever before.

operation of the system

Throughout the Old World and the New, apprenticeships had lain at the core of the production of a skilled labor force. They represented the first stage in a system in which workers began as pupils, progressed to the status of journeymen, and finished their careers as masters. Usually, at the age of thirteen or older, children would be sent away from home to live in the household of a master tradesman. Following seven years of training, workers would then "journey" around looking for employment from those with established shops, aiming to accumulate enough capital eventually to purchase their own workshops and tools and take on their own apprentices. Parents paid a fee for their sons (and sometimes daughters) to enter into an apprenticeship, with the amount charged linked to the status and earning potential of the chosen profession. One of the most prized placements was an apprenticeship with a merchant, and many British and colonial American middling sorts would quite happily pay large sums to get their sons taken on at a prestigious trading house in London, Bristol, Philadelphia, or Boston. Cheap apprenticeships for poorer people were to be found in shoemaking or tailoring, where profits would always be modest and capital requirements were low.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, when large numbers of Britons were departing the metropole for the nation's colonies, certain elements in this traditional working structure had already begun to break down. Most notably, the power of guilds to regulate the cost of apprenticeships, the price of goods, and the number of masters and journeymen working under their jurisdiction was disintegrating. The weakness of the English guilds had a strong impact on the structures of skilled work in eighteenth-century America, as they were too ineffective by this time to reestablish their authority in a New World setting. For one thing, weak government authority meant that terms of apprenticeship did not always last for the full seven years, and by the 1750s shortened terms of five years had become common. In the southern American colonies, training became further curtailed by the prominence of slave labor. Plantation owners often sent some of their slaves to local artisans to learn a trade, with carpentry, bricklaying, tailoring, and shoemaking proving to be the most popular skills. Artisans also purchased slaves themselves and trained them to work in their own shops. However, African Americans rarely received the full seven years of instruction and often obtained as little as two years. For early America's slaves, however, an apprenticeship nevertheless proved to be one of the few routes to a measure of economic independence. Equipped with a specialist skill, African Americans in northern and southern cities were able to earn money on their own account, despite the best efforts of their white masters to prevent them from doing so. A few slaves used such wages to buy their freedom, while many more were able to run away safe in the knowledge that they were in possession of a means to earn a living.

The institution of apprenticeship in America received boosts that kept it vital at least to the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In particular, apprenticeships proved to be an excellent tool for emerging public institutions seeking ways to make poor and orphaned children support themselves. Throughout colonial and early national America, church vestries, orphanages, and charities placed their destitute charges with local artisans to learn a trade, ensuring a steady stream of new trainees. At the same time, as long as the household maintained its position as a building block of early American society, apprenticeship was firmly woven into the social fabric. Often, apprentices were the sons or daughters of family friends, and they lodged with a master and dined with his wife and offspring. As close acquaintances, apprentices sometimes became more than mere employees: many married into their master's family and were then entrusted with the running of the business following his retirement.

demise of the system

At about the time of the American Revolution (1775–1783), however, growing industrialization began to threaten the traditional structures of skilled work, apprenticeship included. Despite mercantilist restrictions imposed by Britain and designed to stop New World manufacturers from competing with their metropolitan counterparts, colonial American industrial development accelerated significantly from the mid-eighteenth century onward. Especially in the large northern cities of Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, workshops increased considerably in size and in some industries—shoemaking, for example—the unit of production began to resemble a small factory. Political independence accelerated this process of industrialization. In the new Republic, Americans not only had the freedom to manufacture their own goods, but had also a strong patriotic desire to free their young nation from dependence on British imports as quickly as possible. Boycotts against the buying of British goods during the 1770s, and again during the War of 1812 (1812–1815), were designed to prevent all purchase of British goods and encourage their replacement with American-made manufactures.

The resulting growth of factories gradually led to the disappearance of the highly skilled and intensely personal working culture embodied by apprenticeship. Unskilled men and women workers began to fill factories. Masters became distanced from their employees, and they no longer hosted them in their households or counted them as part of their families. The position of journeyman also became threatened, and newly qualified apprentices had difficulty finding long-term employment as masters sought cheaper sources of labor and required fewer skills. The wealth gap between masters and journeymen became ever wider, creating a class of dependent workers who had no prospect of being in control of the means of production. And, as the upper echelons of traditional skill structures disintegrated, the institution of apprenticeship was swept away too, as there was little hope of such training leading to a secure income. In the luxury trades (such as cabinetmaking and silversmithing) and in the American South, the demise of apprenticeship was undoubtedly slower, but was under way nevertheless. As the early national period drew to a close, apprenticeship was, if not completely extinct, severely under threat.

See alsoIndustrial Revolution; Labor Movement: Labor Organizations and Strikes .

bibliography

Rock, Howard B., Paul A. Gilje, and Robert Eds Asher. American Artisans: Crafting a Social Identity, 1750–1850. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Salinger, Sharon V. "To Serve Well and Faithfully": Labour and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Emma Hart