LITERACY DATA FROM ANTEBELLUM CHARLESTON

Records of the Charleston Orphan House supplied the data for this study.⁸

Chartered in 1790 “for the purpose of supporting and educating poor orphan children, and those of poor, distressed and disabled parents who are unable to support and maintain them,” the Orphan House was the first public orphanage in America.⁹ Soon after its founding most poor white orphans in the city were making their way into its care.¹⁰ To formalize legal responsibility for the children who had been entrusted to them, commissioners of the Orphan House (i.e., trustees) required the children and their parent or guardian to endorse an indenture, which transferred responsibility for the child from the family (if any) to the institution. The child agreed in the indenture to live obediently in the Orphan House until of age to be bound to a new master, with whom he or she would then reside, work, and be trained.¹¹ Before 1860 most of the Charleston orphans were in fact bound out as apprentices. Other children returned to a new configuration of their natal families, ran away, or died in the Orphan House.

The practice of binding poor children into new families extended back to the earliest English poor laws and was carried forward into colonial law and practice.¹²

Such public apprenticeship was widespread in the South.¹³ As in England, overseers of the poor in Carolina had the authority to seize children without their parents' consent, but all the Charleston children came to the Orphan House voluntarily.¹⁴ Indeed, the typical case began with a plea from a desperate parent, widowed or abandoned, who begged the Orphan House to take in his or (more commonly) her child. The institution was a source of pride among Charleston's white elite, a feeling that seems to have grown along with the gathering criticism of the slave-based economy that supported it. In that sense the charity it provided also served a subtle political purpose, to reassure white Charleston of its fundamentally good nature, at least where the deserving white poor were concerned.¹⁵

Over the entire antebellum period, approximately 2,200 young people lived in the Orphan House for some time. This study considers a subset of these children: those who signed or marked an indenture at entrance, were at least five years of age, and entered before 1840. Up to that year, 98 percent of children endorsed their indentures. About that time the Orphan House ceased requiring children to sign or mark the indenture document, and so endorsements appeared much less frequently in the later period. After 1840, only 35 percent signed their names or marked at entrance. The lack of endorsements was systematically related to child and family characteristics, which diminished the value of those records for literacy analysis considerably.¹⁶

Further, to prevent cases in which adults signed for children from contaminating the sample I omitted all children under five years of age from further consideration.¹⁷ Altogether some 1,073 children who were at least five years of age and entered between 1790 and 1840 signed or marked their indentures. Finally, I also consider a subsample restricted to the 721 children who fulfilled the three criteria above and then were formally bound out as apprentices. Figure 1 shows trends in the Orphan House's population over this period.

To judge from the occasional references to their occupations, parents who sought the help of the Orphan House were indeed poor and distressed. All came from the lower sort of Charleston's white population.¹⁸

Fathers, stepfathers, and male guardians included city guards or constables and shoemakers. One father who worked as an overseer was “not apparently of the lowest class,” according to one carefully drawn recommendation letter.¹⁹ Many were men who worked on the sea, in trades well known for paying poorly. Mothers typically toiled in three kinds of trades: washing, caring for children (including wet nursing), and needlework. The needle was well known for providing a meager income. One reference letter writer described the source of one applicant's penury: “her only dependence for self and another child being the needle, which you all gentlemen must be convinced is not sufficient ever to pay for room, rent, & the most common food.”²⁰ Over the period of this study, the share of children who were brought to the Orphan House by their mothers varied between 45 and 65 percent, with no obvious time trends.

A variety of catastrophic events brought children of these families to the Orphan House. Death of a parent was the most common, and about a third of the children were full orphans (Table 1). In the most common situation a mother nominated her child for admission. Given legal disabilities facing American females who wished to contract, these women had undoubtedly been widowed or obviously abandoned. When a father died, or less commonly ran away, many widows could not earn enough to support their children. Some widowed mothers tried to go out to service, but they found few employers who would let their young children into their homes. Likewise widowers, particularly men who worked on the sea, needed a place for their children to stay while they worked. Some children had been completely on their own before coming to the Orphan House, living rough on handouts from door-to-door begging.

In seeking admission for their children, parents described difficult times in the local economy as well as how these difficulties kept them from providing for their children. In the 1820s Charleston's economy stagnated during a worldwide trough in cotton prices. At the bottom of the city's economy, these parents explained, with “the times being so hard,” economic problems had come to “press so heavily upon the poorer classes,” including themselves.²¹

Many parents hoped to educate their offspring, and made their inability to do so part of their case. Pleading that they were unable to send their children to school, they were certain, they wrote, this was an omission which Orphan House officials would make good. A long-time commissioner relayed a range of concerns in his summary of one widow's application: “She is in utter poverty & wishes to get her child into the institution for education & maintenance, & to maintain herself by going out to service.”²²

Applicants probably did not embellish their stories much, because visiting commissioners literally came to their households, queried neighbors, and checked employers to see how well their stories held up. An unsigned report reveals a broad range of their concerns: “The mother is miserably poor and says she cannot school him…. She washes for a support, and has this one boy with her …. [her] object in trying to get her son into the Orphan House is to have him educated and kept out of mischief. Her occupation keeps her engaged at home and she cannot watch the boy, who she says gets into the street & out of her sight and management.”²³

Occasionally the visiting commissioner recommended that an application be rejected. Sometimes the rejected family had barely enough resources to disqualify it from receiving “the bounty of the institution,” although few among the rejected had much in the way of material wealth. Some were residents of other counties, and thus someone else's responsibility.²⁴ In other cases commissioners adjudged the surviving parent to be well enough to go out and work. One mother's application was rejected not because she had recently remarried and moved into Charleston but because she was sufficiently “strong & capable of supporting child.”²⁵

Masters who took children into their homes were typically not among the fabulously wealthy planter class. They included some of the better-off tradesmen and merchants. Table 2 reports trades to which children were bound, which in nearly every case for boys was also the trade of the master. Seafarers and shoemakers probably did not raise their charges much above their initial station in life. Printers, goldsmiths, and carriage makers, on the other hand, must have helped many poor boys become prosperous artisans. Many boys were bound to merchants, such as those who kept stores in Columbia and other market towns in the upcountry. A few youths were assigned to men of professional standing: apothecaries, physicians, and lawyers. It is worth recalling that the alternatives for these boys did not typically include learning their fathers' trade, because most fathers were dead or long gone from Charleston. Without the Orphan House, they would likely have become manual workers on the sea or in lowcountry agriculture. Because most girls were to be trained as domestics it is hard to say much about how well off their mistresses were. A handful of girls were to be trained by Charleston's small but intrepid corps of women entrepreneurs, such as Mary Ann Judge, who promised to treat her orphan girl with kindness (“in every respect as a daughter”) and teach her to measure laces and ribbons.²⁶

CHILD AND ADULT LITERACY

Indentures in the Charleston Orphan House collection recorded a maximum of five separate measures of actual and potential human capital attainments of various parties: the signature or mark of the child at entrance and the same for the child at exit, the signature or mark of the responsible adult at entrance, the signature or mark of the master or mistress at exit, and the trade which the master was expected to teach the child. Figures 2 and 3 illustrate adult, white literacy rates as estimated from the Charleston records, and some comparable literacy series from elsewhere in America. The dashed lines represent literacy rates of masters and mistresses, while the much lower dotted lines show literacy rates of parents and guardians. In the cases of adults who brought the children to the Orphan House, endorsements of kin and strangers were included in these figures, but those of overseers of the poor, church wardens, and other public officials were not. These men were generally much better off than the desperately poor who brought children to the institution, and in any case were unlikely to have influenced the child's literacy.

The ability to sign one's name was unevenly distributed across Charleston's adult, white population.²⁷

Masters had the highest literacy rates. The next most literate group was mistresses, who were in turn about ten percentage points more literate than fathers and male guardians. At the bottom were literacy rates of mothers and female guardians. To estimate overall literacy rates by sex, I inferred class status from the adult's function in the child raising process. The documentary record is consistent in describing the families of the Orphan House children as desperately poor, and the occupational record of the masters and mistresses indicates that they might best be described as middle class. Thus, within the same social class, men were more literate than women, and within each sex, the middle class of masters was more literate than the poor parents and guardians, none of which is surprising. It is worth noting that middle-class women were more literate than working-class men, however.

Overall literacy for men and for women can be estimated with a weighted average of the literacy rates for each class. Historian Robert Olwell estimated that one-fifth of Charleston's white population in the Revolutionary era was nonslaveowning, working poor—the population from whom the House's inmates were likely to be drawn.²⁸

Lacking other such estimates through the antebellum period, I assume that the share of Charleston's white population that was poor enough potentially to bring their children to the Orphan House remained at one-fifth through the period of this study, and assigned a weight of four-fifths to the master/mistress class. The thick lines in Figures 2 and 3 indicate the overall estimated average literacy rate of white Charlestonians. Each shows a slow and steady increase from the late eighteenth century onwards.²⁹

To assess the quality of these estimates I compare them to the 1850 census (the first to report literacy rates by sex) and to other published literacy series. Literacy as reported in the 1850 federal census (the diamond in each Figure) suggests that the estimates presented here are roughly on the mark, especially for men. For women, nearly universal literacy as reported in the census may have been due to undercounting illiteracy among the white poor. The census found all of 63 illiterate white women in Charleston County in 1850, but Orphan House records show 54 women who could not write their names between 1840 and 1859. Part of the difference in the two measures lies in their definitions of literacy. The census merely asked the head of household about the ability of family members to read and write, which may not reflect true literacy skills.

Series of signatures and marks from elsewhere allow comparisons. Other samples of men were drawn from the lower classes: army enlistees and white merchant seamen. Among these relatively poor men, fathers and male guardians in Charleston were much more literate than contemporary soldiers and seamen in the North. Part of the gap may have been due to age differences. The soldiers were in their mid-20s when they enlisted, and the fathers may have been older than that (their ages were not recorded). Even so, it appears that, recalling Owsley, the poorest young adults in the urban South were relatively literate. Elsewhere in the South at this time, Lachance found that white adult literacy among sponsors of craft apprentices was about 50 percent with no time trend, whereas the master craftsmen who took in these apprentices were nearly all literate.³⁰

The comparison groups of women were of higher social status, which is reflected in their relatively high literacy levels. These women signed or marked wills and deeds in New England, which have been interpreted by scholars as representative of the wealthiest 80 percent or so of the population.³¹

Figure 3 suggests that average literacy rates for Charleston women and for property-holding New England women did not differ by much. Unresolved age differences may have led to these results too, as the New Englanders were probably older than the Charleston women. Even taking that into account, the overall level of white literacy in Charleston was similar to that in the North.

Literacy was increasing in antebellum Charleston. Given the near universal literacy among the middle classes from an early date, the source of the overall increase had to be among the poor, whose literacy increased steadily up to the 1820s and then leveled off. Free schools were probably not an important factor. To begin with, few students attended them. Public support for education in South Carolina originated in a state law of 1811 that entitled every white child to attend a free public school. Even though the number of pupils in Charleston free schools doubled between 1812 and 1834, this still constituted a very small share, less than 5 percent, of the white school-aged population. For example, in 1820 about 300 students attended Charleston free schools, compared to 8,154 white children under 15 years of age in Charleston County. Second, those few children who sporadically attended free schools seem to have learned very little. One historian assessed these schools as “ungraded, poorly staffed, lax in method, quartered in any derelict room that might be rented, and under-financed.” The teachers may have had as little as two more years of schooling than their students.³²

There is a chronological problem as well, because increased free school attendance from 1811 postdated the rise in poor adult literacy from 1790. Altogether, the potential for free schools to have induced the rise in adult literacy seems remote.³³ This implies that the estimates in Figures 2 and 3 are probably accurate measures of adult literacy in early national and antebellum Charleston.

Although we might assume that a young adult who was unable to sign would remain illiterate for life, the probability of a child being literate usually increases with each year of age.³⁴

Figure 4 shows literacy rates by age and sex, with the only cohort effect a crude division of the sample into two at the year of the free school law, 1811. Although children under five were omitted from the present analysis, in fact, few children began to sign their names at ages less than seven. In general, the probability of signing increased with age for all of the earlier children and among the boys in the later cohort. However, among the earlier children literacy rates did not increase after age 10, which suggests that children who had not acquired literacy by then would not learn to write during their childhood. By age 12 about half of the boys and about a quarter of the girls in this earlier cohort could sign, which seems to have been quite similar to literacy among white male apprentices in New Orleans at this time.³⁵

At each age more boys than girls could sign, but differences in literacy acquisition by sex changed dramatically over this period. Prior to 1810, boys' experiences in learning to write were much like girls', in that a few had learned at age seven, a substantial increase in literacy occurred from ages eight to ten, after which age few learned to write. Literacy among all children declined after 1810, and girls' literacy in particular declined to nearly zero during this period of stable or slightly increasing adult literacy. The divergence in literacy acquisition between boys and girls may reflect poor families sending sons but not daughters to free schools.³⁶

One factor in the general decline may have been a selection bias induced by, paradoxically, greater access to free schools. The 1811 law drew into the free schools some poor children who would otherwise have entered the Orphan House to gain access to its school. After free schools became more accessible, parents of these children kept them at home and sent them to the free school. Children of still poorer families that could not support, much less educate, them continued to enter the Orphan House, and this may have shifted the composition of the Orphan House's new children towards the poorest and least educated. The increase in number of boys admitted (Figure 1) suggests an overall increase in the population of the poor of both kinds, which is consistent with the narrative record of a Charleston in decline from perhaps 1820 onwards.³⁷

The case of James and William Bozeman, two brothers who were proposed for admission in 1813, illustrates these motivations. One of their reference letters declared, “The cause of this application is real necessity. If the father was able to clothe and feed them he would get them at a free school but as he is not, we trust your known humanity gentlemen will induce to have these two boys entered into your valuable institution or else they must remain ignorant and unimproved.”³⁸ This case suggests that poor parents preferred to keep their children at home, if they could support them, and at least in some cases to send them to the free school.

A qualitative check on the reliability of the signature literacy data is provided by the occasional estimate of educational levels in some admission applications. Visiting commissioners who investigated applicant families and surviving parents who petitioned for their child's admission occasionally described the child's educational background. These comments can be compared to the child's ability to sign on the indenture. The two sources typically agree with each other. In 1816 two brothers who were described as “without the smallest instruction” both marked their indentures, as did, the following year, a 12-year-old girl who “had no education.”³⁹

Of the two Bozeman brothers, James the six-year-old marked, but eleven-year-old William had learned to sign his name somewhere, if not the free school, before coming to the Orphan House. Later in the period a little schooling generally led to the ability to sign. Although the education of 13-year-old Thomas Stenton had “been almost wholly neglected (being able only to read a little)” when he entered the Orphan House in 1836 he signed his name.⁴⁰ Such narrative estimates constitute more corroborating information on the signer's educational level than can be had from the usual sources of legal records, and provide useful context on the meaning of signature ability.

INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF LITERACY IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

Evidence from the indentures can be used to test a hypothesis first proposed by Lee Soltow and Edward Stevens. Southerners, they suggested, primarily acquired literacy through informal means such as tutoring by family, friends, and co-workers.⁴¹

Alternatively, Owsley emphasized formal schooling, at least in rural areas. Having noted the trends over time in literacy among poor and middling adults, this section considers the importance of those informal sources of literacy, and by inference, the effects of formal schooling as well. Although the effects of free schools may have been limited, that does not preclude a role for other types of schooling such as Sunday or infant schools, or other informal means of education.⁴² Besides schooling, the empirical importance of the family here exemplifies what Kenneth Lockridge called “the nearly unmeasurable processes by which parents transmitted their education to their children.”⁴³

Regression models indicate that a child's ability to acquire basic literacy depended most clearly on his family situation and possibly on availability of schooling as well (Table 3). Here, then, home and school may have been complementary factors in literacy acquisition rather than substitutes. Model (a) in Table 3 used the entire sample, whereas models (b) through (e) were separated by sex and entering cohort. Residence in Charleston served as a proxy for access to free schools and other specifically urban sources of learning such as Sunday and infant schools. The identity of the adult who bound the child into the Orphan House, as given on the indenture, was used to infer the structure of the child's family before admission. Whether that parent could sign was interacted with the identity of the parent or public official to form the parental literacy variables. Their coefficients indicated the conditional effect of paternal or maternal literacy on child literacy, given that the child had been bound in by that parent.

The patterns in literacy by age at entrance in Figure 4 also appeared in the regression results. Age effects had large magnitudes and low levels of statistical significance. Each additional year of age increased the likelihood of signing for all children by 7 percent.⁴⁴

Cohort and sex effects were also apparent. Overall, girls were 13 percent less likely to be able to sign than boys were, a significant difference that grew substantially after 1811. The series of binary variables for decade of admission also suggest a decline in literacy among these children over time, although the coefficients suggest the decline occurred about a decade earlier than Figure 3 shows. That is, children entering even in the 1800s were 20 percent less likely than those entering in the 1790s to be able to sign. This decline, like the increase in adult literacy, occurred before the free school law of 1811. Although narrative evidence indicates that there was some selection of poorer children into the Orphan House due to free school availability, something else was occurring before the free school law that depressed child literacy rates.

Family and residence were important influences on child literacy rates. A child who entered the Orphan House from Charleston was significantly more likely than a child from elsewhere to be able to write. This effect was stronger for boys than girls, and was especially notable after 1811. A child admitted in the later period was about 10 percent more likely to sign if he or she was from Charleston. Prior residence in Charleston may be a proxy for free school attendance or for Sunday school or the other more informal schools that met in the city. Very specific family effects appeared. Children bound in by fathers or by other kin were no more likely to sign than were full orphans bound in by public officials. However, for a child bound in by his or her mother, whether she could write did matter. Overall, children of literate mothers were a significant 8 percent more likely to sign than were children of illiterate mothers. The magnitude of the effect of mother's literacy was about the same as an additional year of age. This result accords with a range of previous work, which suggests that mothers played a quantitatively important role in the rise of American literacy more generally considered.⁴⁵

Figure 4 suggests that girls and boys became literate—remained illiterate might be a better way to describe the girls' case—in different ways. This suggests splitting the sample and estimating different models for girls and boys to tease out differences in literacy acquisition by sex, the results of which appear in Table 3, models (b) and (c). Residence in the city made boys a significant 10 percent more likely to sign but had no significant effect on girls. A remarkable result with implications for within-family relationships was that the mother's literacy significantly increased her son's literacy but not her daughter's. Sons of literate mothers were about 10 percent more likely to have learned to sign their name, whereas daughters of literate mothers were no more or less likely to sign. Literate mothers seem to have concentrated their efforts to pass on the ability to write to their sons rather than their daughters, and they may have been aided in this by free, Sunday, or other schools in the city.⁴⁶

The notion that families and schools were complementary in teaching basic literacy is suggested by the timing of their effectiveness. In Table 3 models (d) and (e) report estimates before and after the state law on free schools in 1811. The effect of age changed little from one period to the next, each year adding 8 to 9 percent to the probability of signing. The effect of family and residence, however, may indicate shifting modes of literacy acquisition over this period. In the earlier period, when free schools were virtually nonexistent, prior residence in Charleston had no significant effect on a child's literacy, and neither did most of the family structure variables. However, in the later period both Charleston residence, which raised the probability of signing by 11 percent, and the literacy of the mother, which increased the probability of signing by 8 percent, were significant.

Thus, to summarize, the children particularly likely to be able to sign were boys whose literate mothers brought them to the Orphan House after 1811. The Charleston effect that appears in the post-1811 regressions may have been due to acquisition of basic literacy in free schools, but it may also have been due to other urban-specific sources such as Sunday schools or private charity schools. In any case, educational resources specific to Charleston appear to have been complementary to a mother's literacy in transmitting literacy to children, and particularly to boys; that is, learning at some kind of school appears to have been reinforced at home by a literate mother to a greater extent than by a mother who could not herself sign. In the case of Charleston, Soltow and Stevens were substantially correct; Owsley's argument may be at least partially correct.

FROM LITERACY ACQUISITION IN EARLY CHILDHOOD TO SKILL TRAINING IN LATER LIFE

Acquisition of basic literacy skills early in life influenced the earliest labor market activities of these children: the types of trades to which they were bound to learn. To see how early life conditions affected later life outcomes, this section investigates connections between literacy acquisition in early childhood and skill acquisition in early adulthood. These connections suggest that labor market outcomes of young adults were influenced by childhood experiences many years previously. The possibility of long-term effects of childhood conditions is illustrated in many present-day studies of longitudinal data, but did such effects occur two centuries ago?

During residence in the Orphan House, surviving family members commonly kept up with the lives of the children. Parents noted in admission applications that relinquishment was a last, desperate resort. One recent widow wrote how “grievous it is to me indeed to part with so young an infant who was a solace to me even in distress.”⁴⁷

A letter attributed to the barely literate father of six-year-old Joseph Carson observed simply enough that “now gentlement you no that they aint one of you that would like to part with your child.”⁴⁸ Once admitted many children enjoyed ongoing relationships with surviving parents. Commissioners usually allowed family members to bring youngsters home for a day or two, whether for holidays, to care for a sick adult, or for their own health to get away from Charleston during the sickly seasons. Aaron Davis's request to take his niece Fanny Mordecai home for Passover was readily granted, as was Catherine Brindlay's request to take her son home for “the Whitsuntide holidays.”⁴⁹

When children reached an age at which they could be bound out, surviving parents played an important part in the matching process that brought master and apprentice together. Parents who lived in the city were given the opportunity to approve or reject their children's apprenticeship. Tradesmen who had gained parental approval made sure the commissioners knew this. “I have consulted his mother on the subject and she consents that he should come to me” wrote a tinsmith. At times, a mother might address the commissioners directly: “I the mother of R[ichard] Taylor consent to his going with Mr Boling to the country. [signed] Ann Taylor” was scrawled at the bottom of one prospective master's application letter. Occasionally such approval was not forthcoming. One mother rejected a master's offer to take her son because she thought his business of house painting was an “unworthy trade.”⁵⁰

Sometimes the mother arranged for the apprenticeship. Margaret Moles, who operated a dry good store, noted that she was applying for a particular girl whose mother had approached her about the position.⁵¹

All parties—child, parent, commissioners, and masters alike—desired to make a good match regarding the child's prospective trade. A boy's initial interest in a trade was probably stimulated just as for boys elsewhere in America: a curious peek into a shop, chance discussions with older apprentices, or advice from adult family members. Parents intervened to direct their children into or away from particular occupations, and the child's abilities, a function of investment in his or her human capital, also played a role. Prospective masters observed child literacy carefully. A merchant from Lancaster, S.C., explained his interest in one boy to the commissioners: “The boy Wm. R. Bull, whom I have seen & conversed with & whose writing, ciphering &c I have also seen, I am pleased with him.”⁵²

The range of potential occupations was considerable for boys but much more restricted for girls (Table 2). It was convenient to aggregate them into three categories for boys and two for girls. For boys, “skilled craft” included the building trades (e.g., mason, carpenter, plasterer); food processing trades (e.g., butcher, baker, confectioner); leather work (e.g., tanner, saddler, shoemaker); metal working trades (e.g., blacksmith, boiler maker, iron worker); seagoing trades (including pilot and navigator); shipping trades (e.g., cooper, ship chandler, sail maker); printing trades (including bookbinder); coach making (including wheelwright); wood working trades (e.g., joiner, turner, cabinet maker); textile production (e.g., upholsterer, hatter, tailor); and other unclassifiable trades such as cigar maker and umbrella maker. The category named “planter/merchant” included not just those bound in those fields but those who were to enter the professions (e.g., architect, attorney, apothecary) and a few highly paid craftsmen such as goldsmiths and jewelers. The “no trade” category included not just boys without a specified trade but those bound to become farmers as well, an occupation which the commissioners generally discouraged boys from entering.⁵³

There was much less variety in the girls' prospective occupations, with over four in five being assigned to learn either needlework or domestic work, or a combination of these traditional jobs. The lines between these two occupations were not cut and dried. Many letters to commissioners from prospective masters who sought girls contained sentences such as the following: “I shall pay every attention to her improvement in domestic oeconomy, needle work &c.”⁵⁴

A few other girls were to be trained in a particular craft, some related to textile work such as millinery (n=20) or upholstery (n=3), and others not, such as baker or jeweler (one girl each). The statistical analysis that follows was based upon whether a girl was assigned to any trade versus no trade at all.

Regression analysis of occupational assignments suggests the extent to which parents intervened in the binding process and the extent to which masters attended to the children's human capital attainments. Table 4 presents a set of multinomial logit regressions for boys and logits for girls, which included age and cohort variables and controls for family structure and own human capital levels. The dependent variables for the boys accounted for differences between white-collar and blue-collar trades, and the comparison category was no trade specified. For girls, the dependent variable was simply trade vs. no trade.

The one consistently significant effect across all three regressions was the child's ability to sign his or her name. Boys and girls alike who could sign were significantly more likely to be assigned to a particular trade rather than be bound to a new master who was not obligated to give them any specific training. For boys, not just present human capital attainments mattered, but so did their endowments as of entrance to the Orphan House. Those who were able to sign several years before being bound out were significantly more likely to be trained in a particular trade, even after controlling for their literacy at binding. Presumably those boys had learned more than just the basics while in the Orphan House, having acquired a minimal level of literacy beforehand. The effect of initial literacy was independent from that of literate parents.⁵⁵

At the same time, family structure at the time of admission to the Orphan House influenced the trade to which boys were bound, but not girls. Boys brought to the Orphan House by their mothers were significantly more likely to be bound into one or another type of trade, whereas those brought by their fathers were more likely to be bound into a skilled trade rather than no trade. Note that according to mean values in Table 1 about five years had passed on average between the formal relinquishment by their surviving parent and the beginning of their apprenticeship. By the time they were bound out, in their early teen years, experiences of many years before in learning to sign their name, or enduring the loss of a father rather than a mother or both parents, influenced strongly how these young people would enter the labor market in early adulthood. Mothers, in particular, appear to have guided their sons into particularly promising trades.