Definition
To bind out is to place a person under a legal obligation to serve another for a defined term, typically through a formal indenture or apprenticeship agreement. The person bound out — most commonly a minor — was committed to a master or employer who assumed responsibility for the individual's labor, training, and often basic maintenance (food, shelter, clothing) in return.
The term is most closely associated with the law of apprenticeship and the historical practice of binding out pauper children. Overseers of the poor and guardians held authority under early poor laws to bind out minor children to tradespeople or householders when the children's families could not support them. The arrangement created enforceable obligations on both sides: the person bound out owed service and obedience; the master owed instruction, care, and compliance with the terms of the indenture.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in general modern use. "Bind" retains a general sense of obligating or fastening; "out" suggests placement with another. The compound "bind out" has no standard modern definition in general dictionaries.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 defines "bind" in relevant part as "to place under legal obligation by oath or by giving a bond" and notes usage such as "bound as an apprentice."
The common language use of "bind" as obligation is close to the legal meaning here, but the specific legal operation — a formal indenture placing a minor in the custody and service of a master under supervised legal authority — carries technical weight that casual usage misses entirely. "Binding out" was a specific legal act with procedural requirements and statutory backing, not merely an informal agreement to serve.
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Why It Matters in Research
BIND OUT is a historically specific term with negligible modern application. Researchers encountering it should treat it as a marker of pre-twentieth-century material, particularly sources dealing with poor relief, apprenticeship law, colonial and early American statutes, and the treatment of dependent children.
Key research traps:
First, jurisdiction and era determine meaning sharply. In colonial American sources, binding out operated under English poor law traditions transplanted to local practice; after independence, individual states enacted their own apprenticeship and poor relief statutes with varying procedures and protections. Reading a Massachusetts source and a Virginia source from the same period interchangeably is hazardous.
Second, binding out of free Black children and, in some jurisdictions, formerly enslaved children after emancipation became a contested legal practice in the Reconstruction era. Apprenticeship statutes were sometimes used to re-impose labor obligations on freedmen's children under the guise of poor relief. Researchers working in this period should not assume that "binding out" in post-Civil War sources carries the same neutral meaning it held in earlier apprenticeship law.
Third, the term overlaps substantially with INDENTURE and APPRENTICESHIP in the historical corpus, but they are not perfectly synonymous. Binding out describes the act of placement; indenture describes the instrument; apprenticeship describes the relationship and training component. Sources may use all three interchangeably or may draw distinctions.
Fourth, modern child labor law, foster care, and guardianship statutes have replaced virtually all functions that binding out once served. A researcher tracing the lineage of juvenile dependency law or child welfare statutes will encounter binding out as the predecessor institution.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both the first and second editions of Black's Law Dictionary provide brief, consistent entries: binding out places one under a legal obligation to serve another, with the apprentice relationship as the paradigm example. There is no meaningful divergence between editions; the second edition reproduces the first with only a typographical variation.
The brevity of both entries reflects the term's status as well-understood shorthand in the legal community at the time of those compilations. What the historical dictionaries do not supply — and what researchers need — is the procedural and statutory framework behind the act: who held authority to bind out, under what circumstances, what the indenture required, and what remedies existed for breach. That framework varied by colony, state, and era and must be recovered from primary sources and period treatises rather than from dictionary definitions.
Neither edition acknowledges the Reconstruction-era controversy over apprenticeship statutes, which represents a significant gap for researchers working in that period.
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Jurisdictional Note
The legal authority and procedures for binding out varied substantially across American jurisdictions and changed significantly after the Civil War. Southern states' post-emancipation apprenticeship statutes attracted particular federal scrutiny and were challenged under the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Researchers should identify the specific jurisdiction and time period before drawing conclusions from any source using this term.
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