The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America

285 Pages·1988·15.99 MB·English

by  W.J. Rorabaugh

THE CRAFT APPRENTICE

The (faft
Apprentice
FROM FRANKLIN TO THE
MACHINE AGE IN
AMERICA
W. J. Rorabaugh
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York Oxford
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York Toronto
Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
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and associated companies in
Beirut Berlin Ibadan Nicosia
Copyright © 1986 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
First published in 1986 by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1988
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Rorabaugh, W. J.
The craft apprentice.
Includes index.
i. Apprentices—United States—History.
2. United States—-Social life and customs—1783-1865.
1. Title. 1104885.Ur,R67 1986 331 .r)V°973 85-8779
ISBN 0-19-503647-6
ISBN 0-19-50189-0 (PPBK.)
4 6 8 10 9 7 5
Printed in the United States of America
For Charles Sellers,
my brother Jim,
and the two Marys
This page intentionally left blank
««» PREFACE «s"
This book tells what it was like to be a craft apprentice in America before,
during, and after the early Industrial Revolution. The story begins in
colonial America, when apprenticeship served several important func-
tions. It was a system of education and job training by which important
practical information was passed from one generation to the next; it was
a mechanism by which youths could model themselves on socially ap-
proved adults; it was an institution devised to insure proper moral de-
velopment through the master's fatherly responsibility for the behavior of
his apprentice; and it was a means of social control imposed upon poten-
tially disruptive male adolescents. Like other institutions with multiple
functions, it often failed to meet all of its objectives and frequently ex-
pressed conflicts among its multiple purposes in internal contradiction
rather than in external conflict with other institutions. In that sense ap-
prenticeship was complex, diverse, and amorphous. These qualities ex-
plain both why it is difficult to understand apprenticeship in all its
subtlety and why it survived as an institution for many generations. In its
many functions, some boldly stated and some, even now, hidden from
view, it provided a safe passage from childhood to adulthood in psycho-
logical, social, and economic ways for a large number of people over a
long period of time.
Eventually, however, apprenticeship entered a period of decline. From
the Revolution to the Civil War, amid the growth of cities, factories, and
immigration, the craft apprentice gradually disappeared. Like a glacier,
the institution receded year by year, imperceptibly at first and more
rapidly later. It first lost its traditional economic and social functions,
then for a time remained an empty facade caricaturing its former self,
and by 1865 was, except for odd semisurvivals, moribund. This book tells
the story both of that transformation and of how American youths who
participated in this declining institution behaved, thought, felt, and re-
sponded along the way. To consider significant regional variations, the
entire country has been surveyed; to consider how the emerging money
economy, market system, and Industrial Revolution affected apprentices
differently situated, the period from the Revolution to the Civil War has
been examined; and to compare and contrast the impact of changing eco-
vili / PREFACE
nomic conditions upon different crafts at different times, all skilled crafts
have been included. When I began, it was my hope to be able to say
something about apprentices of both sexes, but I quickly learned that ap-
prenticeship was a male institution. Occasionally, a woman practiced a
craft that she had learned from her husband or father, but in all the first-
person accounts I read and documents I examined, I never encountered
a female craft apprentice. Poor girls were "apprenticed" to housewifery
or sewing, but that sort of apprenticeship provided only legal guardian-
ship and training in traditional female work rather than the learning of
a craft.1
This study draws heavily upon personal accounts—particularly the
diaries, letters, and autobiographies of apprentices. Through these ac-
counts apprentices have told their own stories, which give a flavor of ap-
prenticeship that can be derived only from the words of participants and
which also enable the reader to ponder these words. These biographical
materials reveal a wide range of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors both in
and out of the workplace. It is the complexity of these experiences that
is perhaps most important, for it warns against the historian's tendency
to arrange the variety of human experiences into neat and ultimately
false stereotypical categories. This use of literary sources goes against the
grain of much recent social history, which has focused on cold, objective
data. Unfortunately, in many cases the data have been so limited as to
reveal little that was new about average people and almost nothing about
their thoughts or feelings. Even when statistical information is combined
with occasional first-person accounts, the paucity of such accounts for a
particular locale makes it difficult for the historian who focuses on one
community to find enough accounts to express richness or diversity—
much less offer historical explanation of thoughts or feelings. This study
has been able to overcome that problem by using many accounts covering
numerous crafts, all sections of the country, and an extended period of
time.
Some will worry that this extant material is not representative, to
which I reply: it is the only material we have for ascertaining the thoughts
and feelings of apprentices, and a careful examination of the social back-
grounds of the authors shows that they were little different from those of
other apprentices. It is true that the Northeast, Quakers, and the craft of
printing are overrepresented—indeed, not a single illiterate apprentice
left behind an account. But this problem should not be exaggerated. Al-
though printing attracted boys who had some fascination for the written
word, such apprentices came from the same sorts of backgrounds as other
apprentices and entered a craft that stood socially and economically on
a par with or only modestly above other crafts. The descriptions of family
Preface / ix
backgrounds in the first-person accounts are similar to the statistical find-
ings in the many excellent social-mobility studies, and an examination of
the 1850 manuscript census for those apprentices who left behind records
shows that their situations were, almost without exception, similar to
those of other artisan youths in the same census. In only one respect are
the apprentices who left behind first-person accounts truly different. Many
were unusually talented and subsequently became famous. But, as their
accounts make clear, when they were apprentices, they were far more like
their youthful fellows than like the famous men they became. Further-
more, we have to learn what we can, where we can. An articulate Sam
Clemens is more revealing of the apprentice state of mind than the ap-
prentice tanner whose diary merely noted "work" after each daily entry.
That sort of diary may be more typical, but it is far less useful. I do not,
of course, suggest that this book was written only from apprentices' ac-
counts, and in addition to a wide variety of primary sources that I con-
sulted, I am grateful for the numerous excellent secondary studies that
have provided valuable statistics and insights.2
My original plan for investigating apprentices was somewhat different.
Since apprentices were supposed to be bound to masters with indentures,
I expected to compile data from lists of indented apprentices. Two fine
studies of colonial Boston and Philadelphia, by Lawrence Towner and
Ian Quimby respectively, showed how local indenture records could be
used to study apprenticeship. David Ruddel's study of nineteenth-century
Quebec City offered interesting comparisons from French Canada. These
three studies depended upon scrupulous records, and, alas, except for
French Canada, there were no such records in the nineteenth century.
The common law did not require registration of indentures, few localities
or states ever required registration, and those that had such requirements
did not enforce them. In addition, as the firsthand accounts make clear,
the decline of apprenticeship was accompanied by a growing proportion
of youths who served informally rather than being indented. While this
dwindling proportion of indentures would make registation lists useless,
even if we had a usable list, it would yield only a few statistics and reveal
nothing about the apprentices' states of mind.3
The rich variety exhibited in the first-person accounts present a di-
lemma for the historian, who seeks to extrapolate a cohesive story of a
group from the particular experiences of individuals. It is the tension
between the particular and the general that gives history its ever changing
shape. The particulars never change, but how they are arranged to form
new general patterns does change. The present study can be summarized
as simply the chronicling of the long-term decline of apprenticeship under
the onslaught of the Industrial Revolution. But to summarize such long-