From Young Refugee to Girl Apprentice: Gender, Race, and Childhood in Antebellum New Orleans

From 1809-1810, over a thousand immigrant children of color arrived in New Orleans. These children and their families were part of the mass refugee population that fled Saint-Domingue during the Haitian Revolution, briefly resided in Cuba, and found a permanent home in New Orleans. Of this population, two free girls of color became craft apprentices in the Crescent City. Lolo Brémont and Elisée Boyer – with the consent of adult sponsors – agreed to train in millinery and carpentry with established artisans. Archival glimpses into their lives emerge in the written contracts stipulating the terms of their apprenticeships, also called “indentures.” Analyzing antebellum Louisiana’s legal parameters for children, women, apprentices, and persons of color alongside the girls’ indentures, this paper argues that apprenticeship was a gendered, racialized, and age-based institution. In general, girl apprentices like Lolo and Élisée trained for less time, received less education, and were welcomed into fewer trades than boy apprentices. The indentures reveal New Orleans’ racial categorization and reliance on nonwhite children for material necessities such as buildings and clothing. As a system for youth labor, apprenticeship visibilizes the ecosystem of adults who held rights over child apprentices. Overall, this paper centers overlooked girls and boys in both the history of the migration and the history of apprenticeship during a turbulent period in New Orleans’ evolution.

Lucy Stark (Stanford University) is a History PhD student in the Transnational, Global, and International (TIG) field with a focus on French colonialism in the Caribbean, Louisiana, and West Africa. She has written on the exploitation of women of color in civil rights debates in late 18th century Saint-Domingue. More recently, she researched the apprenticeship of free children of color in New Orleans. These children were born in Saint-Domingue and Cuba and immigrated to Louisiana in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution. 

Lucy is a Graduate Student Co-Chair of the Slavery & Freedom Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center. She has also worked on historical documentary films to highlight stories of overlooked men and women of the past. She hopes to use her interest in filmmaking and public history to share academic research with a wider audience.