Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [120]
It was no accident that the Common Council wanted “Inhabitants householders” for the night watch. The typical workplace in eighteenth-century New York was part of a private house, or something in close proximity to a private house. Merchants, lawyers, and physicians saw clients and patients in their parlors. Importers and exporters kept their “stores” in attics and back cellars. Retailers displayed their wares, and tavern keepers served their customers, in small ground-floor front rooms. Master craftsmen set up workshops in their own homes—on the first floor, in the basement, in backhouses, or in yards—while their apprentices, slaves, and indentured servants, if any, slept in garrets or nearby outbuildings. Even sugar refineries, shipyards, ropewalks, and tanneries—trades that required heavy, bulky equipment as well as ample space—were located as close as possible to the residences of their owners.
In this domestic mode of production, the heads of households were managers of labor as well as parents. More exactly, their “families” included one or more dependents to whom they weren’t biologically related but over whom they exercised, by law as well as custom, paternal authority (“paternal” more than “parental” because after 1700 only one New York household in six was headed by a woman, typically a widow).
Other than the small handful of constables and the night watch, the freeman-pater-familias, master of his household, was the primary bulwark of public order, because throughout the eighteenth century the freemen’s apprentices ranked among the most troublesome elements of the city’s population. Mostly they were young men between the ages of ten and twenty-one (though William Reade was apprenticed to a tailor in 1701 at the age of five) or girls bound out to learn housewifery, cooking, and sewing. Most were British in origin (because the Dutch rarely made use of formal apprenticeship agreements). Their rights and responsibilities derived from the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers (1562), which was the explicit basis of regulations relating to apprenticeship in New York after 1695. Apprentices swore to serve their masters well and faithfully for a specified period of time (a 1711 ordinance required a minimum of seven years). In return, their masters promised to teach them a trade, to give them adequate room and board, and, at the end of their terms, to release them with whatever clothing, tools, or “freedom money” was required by their written deed, or indenture. Nearly all indentures, moreover, offered to provide some education. In 1693 Frances Champion was apprenticed as a house servant to Elizabeth Farmer, who agreed to “Instruct the said Frances to Reade and to teach and Instruct her in Spining, Sewing, Knitting or any other manner of housewifery.” Night schools for apprentices became popular after 1700, and indentures often included arrangements for them to attend after work.
As surrogate parents, masters also had full authority to discipline their apprentices by any means not causing death or permanent physical injury. In theory, the good behavior of apprentices was ensured by the promise of admission to a trade and automatic membership in the corporation when their terms were over. But apprentices were frequently too young, too homesick, too restless, or (as a printer’s apprentice named Benjamin Franklin said of himself) “too saucy and provoking” to heed their masters. Often they refused to work or worked indifferently. Some returned to their parents or signed up with other masters, actions that could embroil everyone in long and acrimonious litigation. So many simply took to their heels, never to be seen or heard from again, that the runaway apprentice would become a stock figure of the eighteenth-century urban scene. Nor did masters invariably live up to their part of