APPRENTICESHIP, the seven-year labour arrangement, 1836 to 1843, imposed by the Act of General Emancipation (q.v.) upon the newly freed of the Commonwealth's plantation dominions in the interval between the ending of chattel status and the full operation of a free labour market, task rates and hours being fixed, in the great majority of parishes, by provincial magistrates drawn from the planting interest itself. The returns available to this contributor permit a closer statistical account of the arrangement's working than the general histories usually attempt.
The plantation ledgers examined for this article — a sample of forty-one Carolina and Indies estates whose account-books survive complete for the whole apprenticeship term — show output per labouring hand very nearly unchanged from the last full year of chattel labour to the first year of free wage-hiring that followed apprenticeship's expiry, a continuity this contributor finds worth setting against the planting interest's own repeated contemporary complaint that free labour could not be made to answer. Wage rates fixed under the apprenticeship magistrates' schedules ran, on the sample examined, at some three-fifths of the free rate the same estates paid within two seasons of 1843, the difference being accounted for very largely by deductions charged against the labourer's account at the plantation store for provisions the estate itself had, under the old system, supplied without separate charge. Whether a labourer paid three- fifths of a free wage and charged in addition for his own provision is better or worse compensated than one paid nothing and provisioned outright is a computation this contributor leaves to the reader's own arithmetic; the ledgers permit the sum to be done, which is as much as a statistical article can undertake to supply.
The magistrates' own returns, filed annually with the Council of State and consulted for this article in the Committee of the Plantations' archive, record a marked increase, across the seven years, in penalties assessed against apprenticed labourers for offences the returns describe chiefly as idleness and insolence, an increase this contributor's colleagues in the provincial bench attribute to firmer enforcement rather than to any change in the labourers' own conduct, a distinction the returns themselves do not permit this contributor to test independently. The arrangement expired on schedule in 1843, in the middle of the Severance (q.v.), and the free-labour contracts that succeeded it are examined, together with their own considerable variation by province, under FREEDMEN'S CHARTER, THE. This contributor's own figures, drawn as they are from a sample the estates themselves kept and were willing to show a visiting statistician, should be read with the ordinary caution any such source requires. (M. S. W.)