I have come late to the discussion of supposedly orphaned children who
were bound out, or indentured, after the Civil War.  I imagine that some
genuine orphans were genuinely helped by altruistic people in this
manner, but the record suggests that the indenture and vagrancy laws at
the county level were used by planters who needed very cheap labor after
the war.  I wrote about this in my book "The Hairstons," and you will
also find it discussed in Lynda Morgan's "Emancipation in Virginia's
Tobacco Belt," and in Rebecca Scott's article, "The Battle Over the
Child: Child Apprenticeship and the Freedman's Bureau in North
Carolina," published in the National Archives magazine "Prologue,"
Summer 1978, p. 100.

It is my belief, which I stated in "Hairstons," that slavery of children
survived in practice for a brief time after the war.  Children who had
become separated from their parents for whatever reason were bound over
as apprentices to farmers, and even when a child's parents later
appeared and asked for custody they could not obtain it.  If parents
could not find work they ran the risk of being legally declared
vagrants, which made their children subject to the apprenticeship
law--any child who might become a burden on the county could be
indentured to a planter until the child was 18, in the case of girls,
and 21 in the case of boys.  Lynda Morgan found that hundreds of black
parents in Henry and Pittsylvania Counties begged the army to rescue
their children, but the army did nothing.  Some desperate parents
kidnaped their children from plantations, only to have the sheriff
appear at their door to drag the child back to the planter who held the
documents of indenture.

I wrote about an incident that occurred at the black school in Danville
run by the Quakers. One day a boy appeared at the mission, pouring out a
story that he had escaped from a plantation where he was being
mistreated.  The head teacher took him under her wing, only to have a
constable and a plantation owner turn up.  The planter had with him the
paperwork showing that the boy was legally bound to work for him until
he was 21.  The teacher pleaded and threatened, but it was no use.  The
planter tied the boy's arms behind his back and led him away.  If the
planter had only been thinking of the boy's best interests, he would
have left him at the Quaker school. As one of the Quakers remarked, "The
Slave Power is not dead."

For my ongoing research on George Washington I have been going through
the colonial era apprenticeship records in Fairfax and Westmoreland,
where members of the Washington family sat on courts and vestries.  I
found a basic distinction in the treatment of apprentices --white
orphans and "bastards" were taught reading, writing, and a useful trade;
mixed-race apprentices (free because their white mothers were free) were
not taught anything--they were routed to the lowest rung of the laboring
class.

Henry Wiencek
Charlottesville

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