Labor Of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship In North Carolina, 1715-1919. This item is unavailable.Labor Of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship In North Carolina, 1715-1919

On an autumn day in 1866, Wiley Ambrose and Hepsey Saunders, former slaves who lived as husband and wife, received a knock at their door. Three men from a plantation in Brunswick County, North Carolina, presented court-ordered apprenticeship papers authorizing the immediate seizure of the couple's daughters, fifteen-year-old Harriet and thirteen-year-old Eliza. After a brief stay in jail with other children, the sisters were sent to work as plantation servants and field hands until age twenty-one. With that startling example, Karin L. Zipf begins Labor of Innocents, the first comprehensive exploration of forced apprenticeship in North Carolina, from its colonial origins until its demise in 1919 with passage of the Child Welfare Act. Zipf refuses to nostalgically view apprenticeship as a benign form of vocational training and instead presents irrefutable evidence that it existed as a means to control the composition and character of families, to provide alternate sources of cheap labor, and to ensure a white patriarchal social order. Codified by law, involuntary apprenticeship allowed courts to define who was an unacceptable parent, which varied depending upon the current social and political agenda of authorities. An impressive blend of legal, social, and labor history, Labor of Innocents illuminates past concepts of family and the realities families endured.