Individuals within southern communities recognized the purpose of these laws and why former slave owners were seizing the opportunities that apprenticeship afforded them. Former slave owners wanted a bound labor force that was legally obligated to submit to their will, and the apprentice laws provided them with one way to secure it. But neighbors who witnessed the injustices they committed against their apprentices and the freed parents of these children might plead with officials “in the Name of Humanity” to stop what they considered the involuntary enslavement of freed children.
