Lire, Ecrire, et Chiffrer: Apprenticeships and the Education of Antebellum Louisiana's Gens de couleur libres

• In Event: 42.036 - Historical Perspectives on Educational Opportunity

Abstract

This study considers the role of apprenticeships in the education of Louisiana’s gens de couleur libres during the early nineteenth century. Although Louisiana was a slave society, demand for skilled labor in the taming of eighteenth-century Louisiana allowed Africans to be cast not merely as brute labor, but as an adept workforce. Such conditions seeded occupational opportunity for Louisiana’s tradesmen of color as young libres continued to be apprenticed at the same trades as their bound forbearers. Apprenticeship records reveal the opportunity for young men of color to learn a trade, and an expectation of literacy at the culmination of that training as contracts often required that said apprentice be taught to “lire, ecrire et chiffrer convenablement.”

Author

• Alisha Johnson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign