Scholars in American history have been accustomed to consider apprenticeship as a system by which, from colonial days to the late antebellum period, fathers could voluntarily bind their children to a master, by means of a written contract, in order to provide them with the opportunity to learn a useful trade. And these fathers did not necessarily belong with the poorest classes of society. As a contractual form of labor, apprenticeship did not entail any loss of freedom for the individual, lest the observance of the obligations specified in the contract. Although different from indentured servitude, in that the contractor was not the same person who was bound to labor for a master for a given number of years, voluntary apprenticeship shared a number of characteristics with the former.

In her book, Karin L. Zipf shows instead that a much more widespread form of apprenticeship did exist in America from colonial times that was of a compulsory nature in that it was enforced by the courts. Until the early 1800s forced apprenticeship was common in all American states, but it later declined in the North with the affirmation of the industrial economy. In the South, on the contrary, it “evolved in the shadow of slavery as another form of forced labor,” becoming stronger and stronger in the last few decades of the antebellum period (p. 8).

Concentrating her analysis on the state of North Carolina, Zipf illustrates how forced apprenticeship was always, indeed, a system of social control, constantly evolving as to reflect changing social perspectives on race, class, and gender, until its final abolition in 1919, with the passing of the Child Welfare Act. During the colonial era, forced apprenticeship was meant to limit the financial onus of local governments in the support of indigent children. Reflecting similar attitudes entertained elsewhere in the colonies, the North Carolina law defined an orphan as any child with no father, thus denying women guardianship rights. In so doing, it not only implied that women were by definition unable to support their children alone, but also that they lacked the moral qualities to do so properly, no matter how economically self-sufficient they were. In this way, poor widows and single mothers were also deprived of an important source of financial support for the family. As a notable example, Zipf mentions the case of future U.S. president Andrew Johnson who, when a boy, had fallen under the forced apprenticeship law along with his brother, but later escaped that condition and fled to Tennessee with his mother and brother.

The apprenticeship laws enforced by the courts were all the more designed to control free blacks and mulattoes. In such cases, even couples could see their children forcibly taken away from them if the parents were not married, or did not have a steady and honest occupation. With the passing of time and the increase in numbers of the black population of the state, forced apprenticeship was further extended. This practice continued, and even intensified, during Reconstruction as an attempt by former masters to regain control over at least a part of their lost slave labor force. The Freedmen's Bureau always disapproved of this practice, and became a reference point for the freedpeople's claims to have their apprenticed children back. However, as Zipf rightly points out, while Freedmen's Bureau agents “idealized free-labor principles” (p. 73), their racist bias made them believe in the inferiority of African Americans and, consequently, in their unfitness to enjoy full independence. So, they mostly endeavored to restrict, rather than eradicate apprenticeship. At the beginning of Reconstruction, court practices had tried to be more flexible and generous toward white women. However, the pressures exerted by the claims of freeedwomen to equal treatment with whites resulted in the passing of a new state law which gave the courts the power to apprentice the children of all single or widowed women regardless of race or class. This policy was inspired by the same fears which led to the approval of laws establishing requisites for voting: although they were designed to curb the rights of African-Americans, they unavoidably disenfranchised lower-class whites as well.

The changing of times was signaled, from the 1890s, by the emergence of a reformist spirit that placed new emphasis on children's rights and welfare. Child-labor reformers began to attack the institution of forced apprenticeship, fighting a long battle against industrialists, who wanted to continue to exploit child labor, and staunch white supremacists, who maintained that the innate inferiority of blacks made it indispensable to subject them to some sort of bonded labor for the protection of white society. Southern reformers, however, were more interested in white children than they were in blacks, and embraced the expansion of state paternalism in favor of white children so that the 1919 law ultimately “reinforced southern hierarchies of gender, race, and class” (p. 152).

This interesting study has more than one merit. First of all, it adds further articulation to the history of the white laboring classes of a state, North Carolina, that has perhaps been one of the most widely studied from this perspective during the past two decades. Furthermore, the author's utilization of legal sources allows her to successfully achieve the always auspicated but not so often achieved interconnection between the categories of gender, race, and class in the writing of southern social and labor history. In this regard, Zipf's book is a notable example of how the history of the southern laboring classes—either black or white—should be approached.

Although convincing in her arguments and in the documentation brought in its support Zipf, however, does not tell us—apart from a few cursory references to other states—how the North Carolina apprenticeship laws compared with those of the other slave states. We can only surmise that they were pretty much alike, although I suspect that Tennessee, for example, either had milder laws for the apprenticeship of free colored female heads of families or their application was more lax. The case of Andrew Johnson that she makes and reiterates could have been an appropriate opportunity to describe differences, if any, either between the apprenticeship laws of Tennessee and North Carolina or in their application. This fact notwithstanding, Zipf's book is a valuable piece of original and well researched historiography.