The Struggles of Apprenticeship and Poverty: Free Children of Color and Their Families in Early North Carolina

This paper examines the experiences of free children of color who were apprentices in colonial and early national North Carolina. The paper argues that the apprenticeship system challenged parents who sought to control their children’s labor while at the same provided many children with educational opportunities and training unavailable to them through other venues. Among free people of color, poor women and children faced the greatest threats to physical liberty and their abilities to determine their destinies and those of their families. From the colonial period through the early national era, poor free people of color, especially women and children, continued to deal with laws that promoted the mastery of the rich over the poor and upheld the influence of elites who sought to extract as much as possible from bound laborers. Across the state, poor women had their children seized by county officials in order to have them bound as apprentices.