Babes in Bondage: Indentured Irish Children in Philadelphia in the Nineteenth Century
THE experiences of childhood, emotional, enhanced by the innocence of youth, and profoundly affecting, are a challenge to the imagination of the social historian. Children, even more than adults submerged in the mass of illiterate and inarticulate people in the past, are largely without historical chroniclers. Study of the influence of social customs, of home life, education and work life requires insight into the conditions of childhood. Not only were attitudes toward childhood different in the past from those of our own time, but there were types of juvenile experience quite different from contemporary forms of childhood participation. This is readily illustrated by the institution of child indentures in the nineteenth century. In Philadelphia the practice of legally binding children extended back to colonial times, from whence it was derived from England. Part of William Penn's original scheme for populating his vast holdings was a plan by which emigrants would be first indentured to captains of ships in England, and upon landing in Pennsylvania the indenture would then be sold to an American buyer. The institution of indenture was ancient, rooted in law and custom, and accepted as part of the economic and social life in the colonies.